U.S.A. — “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.”
The “Only Ones” writ large, with the intent of establishing a monopoly of violence. Lula explains:
“But we cannot allow gun arsenals to be in people’s hands. We will continue to fight for fewer weapons in our country. Only the police and the army must be well-armed.”
We’ve seen what happened before in Brazil when that was the case.
“People here fear the police and their guns more than they do the (drug) dealers,” I quoted various reports in a 2006 GUNS Magazine article on Brazilian citizen disarmament. Revelations included:
“Brazil’s police ‘execute thousands’… A lot of these killings are quasi-executions, with shots to the head and the heart … police in Rio and its suburbs … have taken the lives of more than 4,000 people in the past five years … In the worst massacre in Rio’s history, police officers gunned down 29 men, women and children on the night of March 31.”
Who would want to establish such ruling conditions except for a political criminal?
Unsurprisingly, Lula fits the bill of a criminal “lawmaker.”
“In 2017, he was convicted for bribery after accepting a seaside apartment from a construction company in exchange for lucrative government contracts,” DW reported in 2021. “The following year, another court found him guilty of corruption and he was sentenced to a total of 26 years on charges of taking bribes.”
The conviction was voided by Brazil’s Supreme Court on an eight -three vote not because he was innocent, but on a technicality “that the lower federal court where Lula was tried lacked jurisdiction.”
How the new disarmament edicts will play with Brazil’s established “gun culture” will be instructive. Defiant Bolsonaro backers should not be surprised to find themselves smeared as extremists and conflated with criminal insurrectionists by highly-placed government officials and the media, just like here in the U.S.
Meanwhile, reminiscent of Donald Trump’s political struggles:
Brazil’s top electoral court ruled last month that Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for any political office until 2030 for abusing his power and casting unfounded doubts on the country’s electronic voting system.
Brazil is about to test George Santayana’s assertion, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
And if Democrats have their way, the United States won’t be far behind.
Also see:
- Brazil Nuts
- Bolsonaro Forced to Back Down on Easing Brazil Gun Infringements
- Brazil Will Condemn Itself to Repeat Past if ‘Anti-Gun’ Lula Returns to Power
- Brazilians Setting Themselves Up Repeat Past if Anti-Gun Socialist Elected
- Brazil’s Leftists Set Sights on Renewed Citizen Disarmament
- Totally Unsurprisingly, Brazil Begins Gun Bans Ahead of Lula Inauguration
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
