Brazil’s Bolsonaro attributes murders reduction to easing gun restrictions

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Thursday, July 7, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said the reduction in violent deaths in Brazil in 2021, which reached its lowest level since 2011, is due to his policy of making the carrying and use of firearms more flexible.

“I make it clear that violence has decreased in Brazil, and one of the factors has been that (gun ownership). If the number of deaths by firearms had increased, I would be blamed, but since it has decreased, nobody says anything,” said the president during the weekly broadcast on his social networks.

In Brazil, 130 homicides per day were registered in 2021, for a total of 47,503 deaths. Although the number still alarms, it corresponds to the lowest figure in the last ten years, according to data from the Brazilian Public Safety Yearbook, which compiles official data from the country’s 27 states.

Although the number of violent deaths in the last year fell by 6.5% compared to 2020, the figures are still high.

The number of firearms in the hands of private individuals, meanwhile, grew by 241% in Brazil during the Bolsonaro government, according to data from the same yearbook released last week.

In 2019, when Bolsonaro came to power, there were 197,390 safe-conducts granted to private individuals, a number that by June 30 this year had soared to 673,818 registrations, according to the Army database.

Bolsonaro, Brazil’s main standard-bearer of the civilian gun movement, celebrated this certification of “almost 700,000″ gun holders, mainly hunters, collectors, and sport shooting practitioners.

The legal shooting clubs, the president also mentioned, also increased during his mandate, which began with 800 such entities and “doubled” to the current 1,600.

“I am an enthusiast of armament for good citizens,” and “armament is a matter of national security because the armed people will never be enslaved,” he reiterated.

According to the National Weapons System (Sinarm), the number of firearms in the hands of individuals (4.4 million) surpassed those in public bodies, and almost a third of them (1.5 million) have expired registrations.

With information from El Comercio