A few days separate two shootings inside schools in Brazil. Both crimes were committed with weapons obtained, in principle, legally — one belonged to a CAC (collector, shooter or hunter) and the other belonged to a military police officer. The most recent case took place on Wednesday morning (05/10), when a 15-year-old shot three students at a school in Sobral, in the state of Ceará. One victim died. According to police, the teenager planned the attack after being bullied at school.
The weapon was acquired by the student from a CAC (Collector, Shooter, and Hunter). The gun’s owner tried to sell it, first, to members of a shooting club in Sobral and then offered it to the 15-year-old boy via WhatsApp.
On September 26, a 14-year-old teenager shot and killed a student in a wheelchair in Barreiras, state of Bahia. According to the police, the weapon used in the crime was a revolver that he took from his father, a military police officer. The teenager would have found the gun under the mattress, where his father used to keep it. He entered the school’s main gate hooded and fired at the student in the school yard.
Such events lead us to question if this can become more common, especially after the flexibilization in the laws that control the purchase of weapons by civilians in the country.
CHANGE IN GUN POLICY
A motto of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration has been to facilitate the purchase of weapons by the population. The federal government has already issued 17 decrees, 19 ordinances, two resolutions, three normative instructions and two bills that make the rules for access to weapons and ammunition more flexible. In his administration, in addition to encouraging the common citizen to arm themselves, Bolsonaro gave the population access to more powerful calibres.
According to Instituto Sou da Paz, the number of weapons acquired by CACs more than tripled from 2018 to 2022. Today, there are more than 1 million weapons in circulation compared to 330,000 four years ago. In the Institute’s understanding, three main factors contribute to the recurrence of these school gun incidents. The first is the increase in weapons in circulation. The second is the lack of supervision and control by the Army and the third is the incentive and banalization of weapons by the government.
The institute also alerts that Brazil begins to collect cases of school shooters, for which the United States have become famous. Every time there is an attack in the USA, this discussion of gun control occurs. In Brazil, the ONG also warn about the risks of this wide access to firearms. In its vision, we should continue to see cases like this more frequently because of the recent facilitation to the acquisition of arms.
President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva plans to implement, in the first week of government, in January 2023, a “repeal” of ordinances and decrees published during the administration of Jair Bolsonaro that facilitated access to firearms.
However, based on scenarios already studied outside the country, researcher Daniel Cerqueira, a member of the Brazilian Public Security Forum, believes that the effects of flexibilization should be felt with greater intensity in the coming years. For him, a weapon purchased today will not be used immediately. This is because a homicide, from a statistical point of view, is a rare phenomenon. People don’t buy guns and go out shooting, killing each other.
A study published in the United States by the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that the most negative effects of acquiring a gun peak between two to three years after the license is released. Researchers warn that, even so, damage can be caused up to 50 years after purchase.
Security experts, also point to the precariousness of Brazilian arms control. Brazil passed a gun control legislation in 2003, the Disarmament Statute. If it had been implemented, it would have brought conditions for responsible arms control in the country. However, most of the provisions of this legislation have not been implemented and have still been dismantled since its approval, in a process that accelerated from 2019 onwards.
The legislation has provisions that were never implemented, such as the integration of the two-gun registration systems in force in Brazil, one under the responsibility of the Army, the other administered by the Federal Police.
These weaknesses have become even greater and more evident, they argue, after the series of actions by President Jair Bolsonaro that expanded civilian access to weapons.
AMERICA’S CASE
Such attacks have emerged in the US, which maintains a permissive regime for the trade in light and heavy weapons.
Between 2002 and 2019, the period in which eight cases of shooting attacks by students or former students on Brazilian schools were recorded, the US recorded 1,288 episodes in which weapons were fired inside or against schools, according to K-12 School Shooting Database.
For experts, the comparison with the US, even if it seems disproportionate, is relevant. According to them, research has investigated why there are so many attacks on schools on American soil based on data such as the incidence of mental disorders among young people in several countries around the world. They say that the difference between the United States and other developed countries that stood out was the availability of weapons, which is much greater in North American territory.
Among the Brazilian cases uncovered by Instituto Sou da Paz, 77.7% involved the use of revolvers, a weapon whose trade is allowed here, and which has reduced firepower when compared to machine guns and rifles commonly used in US attacks.
This type of marksman wants a weapon with which he can do as much damage as possible. And most Brazilians could only get their hands on revolvers. This is no accident. The fact that we didn’t have the legal sale of rifles and machine guns made a difference because it made these weapons extremely expensive on the illegal market, making them accessible only to organized crime.
GUNS DON’T KILL
Defenders of gun liberation argue that the problem is not the gun, but the criminality. These are the people who consciously chose to commit barbarism and break the criminal law of Brazil. For Bene Barbosa, shooting instructor and author of books on the subject, the weapon that can be used in a robbery is also the weapon that can be used to prevent the same robbery, protect your home, or prevent them from doing barbarism to your family. Usage is what changes.
He argues that since it is impossible to disarm criminals, as they will always find a way to obtain weapons illegally, disarming a citizen is causing a disproportionate force between society and criminality. For him, the argument that armed countries would be more violent would not hold. He argues that of the 25 most armed countries in the world, none is among the most violent or with the most murders.
Meanwhile the CEO of Taurus and president of the National Association of the Arms and Ammunition Industry, Salesio Nuhs, declares that Brazil continues to have the largest and best system for controlling the sale of arms and ammunition in the world. Nuhs says that Brazil is the only country in the world that marks ammunition; in addition, all the weapons are tracked. He argues that the country has not eased access to weapons in recent years. The requirement and bureaucracy remain the same. What happened is that more calibres were released.
According to Taurus CEO, the rules cannot be impeditive, but they must exist to provide a safer future. Since if you want something and it is not accessible in a legal way, you will get it illegally. In any segment control cannot be an impediment, but it must exist.
DAMAGES REDUCTION
Episodes involving school shooters have become increasingly frequent in Brazil. The high number of cases has led many educational institutions in the country to adopt protocols in the event of shootings, subjecting students, and teachers to training. Marcelo Bini, US Federal Investigator, US Army War Paramedic, and former Texas Police Officer, reveals that it is possible to prepare for cases of active threats and how to reduce the damage in these situations. The way is to create protocols, including for potential victims.
According to him, the US Department of Homeland Security has a program to train lay people on how to react to an active threat, called ‘run, hide, fight’.
Run: You need to run and get out of the place. This training consists of studying school maps, for example, to know where to run.
Hide: When it is impossible to run away from the threat, the second step is to hide inside a classroom that is locked, inside a place where access will be difficult. It’s no use hiding in a hallway behind a trash can.
Fight: And the third step doesn’t mean literally fighting but fighting for your life. That is, creating mechanisms to divert attention from a potential aggressor. There was a case in which they threw 23 boxes that were piled up on the floor of a school for the threat to think that we had movement and, when he went inside the school, these people were able to leave more quickly, explains the expert.
Another important point is that after the Sandy Hook attack in 2012, US security agents realized that people were dying from preventable injuries. That is, shooting in the arm, in the leg, where you can apply a tourniquet, for example. For this, people must learn to provide first aid in case of a traumatic event.
