Guns, Guns

Brazil is eyeing a law where anyone over 21, including people accused of crimes or convicted of less than serious crimes, would be allowed to purchase up to nine firearms a year and 50 rounds of ammunition a month.

A draft law scaling back current limits has already been approved in committee and is due to go to the country’s lower house of Congress in November, according to reports.

Brazil at the moment  has one of the highest murder tolls on the planet,

A 2015 report on violence in Brazil says around 42,000 people were shot dead in 2012 – the highest figures for gun crime in 35 years, according to the BBC.

“More than half of those killed were young men under the age of 30 – two-thirds were described as black,” they report.

At present, weapons can only be bought legally by people obtaining a license on a case-by-case basis.

Supporters say freeing up gun sales will allow people to protect themselves in a country plagued by violent robbery and intense confrontations between drug gangs and police, with some 40,000 gun-related deaths a year.

“Our proposal is to guarantee the good citizen’s right to self-defense,” said the law’s author Laudivio Carvalho, from the powerful centrist PMDB party.

But opponents fear that Brazil’s orgy of gun violence would simply spin further out of control.

“It’s a return to the Wild West,” said Ivan Valente, a deputy from the leftist PSOL party.

The bid to overturn the existing 2003 law on regulations is part of a conservative agenda in Congress where Evangelists and the so-called “bullet-caucus” of right wing politicians with links to the security services are a powerful force.

Related draft laws include seeking a legal definition of family that would exclude homosexual couples and criminalizing abortion for women in cases of rape.

Source: Deputy Joao Rodrigues, from the right-wing PSD party, said the gun law is necessary because the state “does not fulfil its obligations” to defend citizens.