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If Brazil’s Firearm Ban Is So Great, Why Won’t Gun-Control Activists Bet On It?

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Kamaji:
If Brazil’s Firearm Ban Is So Great, Why Won’t Gun-Control Activists Bet On It?

BY: JOHN R. LOTT, JR.
MAY 17, 2023

Brazil has banned gun and ammunition sales, but leading gun-control academics are unwilling to bet that murder rates will fall.

In just four years in office, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro introduced reforms that increased gun ownership six-fold. But on Jan. 1, on his first act in office, the newly inaugurated Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed an executive order banning sales of guns and ammunition and limiting people to a maximum of three guns. Lula also banned concealed carry and is moving to take away gun ownership licenses issued under Bolsonaro. Naturally, gun-control supporters are thrilled, but none of the leading academics who support these policies are willing to put their money where their mouths are and bet that murder rates will fall.

Over the last five years, many academics and journalists predicted Bolsonaro’s dramatic loosening of gun-control laws, which started in 2019, would cause murder rates to soar in the country. Now, they predict that Lula’s severe crackdown on gun ownership will reduce crime.

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Unique One-Country Case Study
Brazil provides a unique experiment because of how radical the changes in law are. In the U.S., the handgun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C., provide the closest case studies. But many gun-control activists dismissed the post-ban increases in murder in those cities, arguing that the ban could only work if the entire country instituted the same rules. With Brazil, we have a country-wide case to examine.

When Bolsonaro became president on Jan. 1, 2019, Brazil had one of the highest homicide rates of any developed country.

In 2018, the year before Bolsonaro became president, the homicide rate stood at 27.8 per hundred thousand people — 5.5 times higher than the U.S. rate. The murder rate then fell in each consecutive year. By 2021, the third year of Bolsonaro’s presidency, it had dropped to 18.5 — a 34 percent drop and a rate not seen in Brazil since the early 1990s.

In December, Dan Webster of Johns Hopkins University claimed that for Brazil, “every 1 percent increase in firearm ownership is associated with a 0.6 percent increase in overall homicide rates.” If that were true, a more than 600 percent increase in gun ownership should have resulted in a more than 360 percent increase in homicides, not a 34 percent drop. Instead, researchers attributed the drop to a slight decline in the 12-to-29 age group’s population share and “a decade of investment in policing” in some parts of the country, even though murders fell in all but one of the country’s 26 states.

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/17/if-brazils-firearm-ban-is-so-great-why-wont-gun-control-activists-bet-on-it/

GtHawk:
I'm betting that the homicide rate in Brazil, when/if they let the truth out will jump right back up to pre Bolsonaro levels or higher since the criminals won't have to be afraid again.

mountaineer:
https://www.ammoland.com/?p=546270#ixzz88brc97gA
Brazil Returns to Gun Control of Old Under Socialist Dictator Lula
Ammoland Inc.
Posted on July 26, 2023
by David Codrea

“Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva tightened restrictions on firearms access by decree Friday,” German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) reports. “The executive order reverses his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s regulations that expanded gun ownership in the country.”

Such an edict, unilaterally imposed by the executive branch without checks and balance es, is what’s known as a diktat, meaning exactly what it sounds like. Noting Lula’s Marxist background and support for the totalitarian regimes of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, his affinity for “¿Armas para que?” is hardly surprising.

What this particular order does is “reduces the number of guns civilians can possess for personal safety from four to two, and reduces the allowed ammunition for each gun from 200 rounds to 50. It asks civilians for documentation to prove their need for guns and bars them from owning 9 mm pistols, restricting them to members of the police and military.”  ...

Sighlass:
Can't own 9mm now, can't carry loaded, can't buy more than 4 (or 2) guns, can't have more than 50 rounds of ammo.... There is less than a million guns (800,000) in a country or 217 million people. If half own multiple guns, that means probable less than one out of 500 own a gun.

Not seeing gun violence going down one way or another with common folks not owning a defensive weapon. It is a criminal's playground.

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