Decree by Brazil’s New President Keeps His Campaign Promise to Expand Gun Rights

Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro (shown), who assumed his office on Tuesday, made many campaign promises. He supported his country’s national sovereignty and opposed abortion, affirmative action, and drug liberalization, while supporting closer relations with the United States and Israel. But his signature promise — supported by his famous finger-gun salute — is to liberalize his country’s gun laws. Since its enactment in 2003 Brazil’s murder rate has soared: Brazil has the highest homicide rate in Latin America and the eighth highest in the world.

Parallels to the U.S. president and the head of the National Rifle Association are obvious, based on his comments on Facebook in October: “Weapons are tools, inert objects, that can be used to kill or to save lives. This depends on who’s holding them: good people or bad guys.... Why have I always defended the ownership of firearms? It’s so that you, upstanding citizens ... can have a weapon inside your house or your farm. If some guy breaks down the door to your house, knocks down the gate to your farm, you have the right to react.” 

Last Saturday, three days before assuming office, Bolsonaro issued his decree on Twitter: “By decree, we plan to guarantee the ownership of firearms by citizens without criminal records.”

With the support of the legislative branch consisting of an upper and a lower house of representatives, the new law expanding gun rights could look like this:

• Removal of the present ability of police to arbitrarily deny a permit to own a gun;

• Reduce the minimum age for gun ownership from 25 to 21; and

• Allow Brazilian gun owners the right to carry guns for self-defense.