Armed Violence and the Politics of Gun Control in Brazil: An Analysis of the 2005 Referendum

Abstract

This article analyses the factors behind the paradoxical result of the Brazilian gun-control referendum. It adopts a qualitative approach to explore the dissemination of ideologies surrounding crime, gun control and security. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with activists involved in the referendum's campaign. The results reveal that ideologically driven campaigns in a context of corruption scandals, high levels of violence and fear influenced the result. The neoliberal discourse of individual freedoms played a role, as did the phrasing of the referendum's question, fragile confidence in public institutions and unequal campaign funding and regulation.Keywords: Brazil, firearms, gun control, policing, public security, violence.Data from the Brazilian Ministry of Health and the United Nations reveal that on average 38,000 firearms deaths happen in Brazil annually. Between 1980 and 2012 over 880,000 people died from firearm wounds in Brazil, a country with firearm death rates higher than countries at war (21.9/100,000 inhabitants in 2012 and 47.6/100,000 among the population aged 15-29) (Waiselfisz, 2015). As a point of comparison, the world's average homicide rate in the year 2000 was 8.8/100,000; for high-income countries it was 2.9; for low and middle-income countries it was 10.1 (Bailey and Dammert, 2006).A decade has passed since the Brazilian Government approved a referendum that enabled the population to vote on whether to ban gun sales to civilians. A vote for the ban was expected to have had a significant impact on the international community and on gun control policies around the world. Three weeks before the referendum, campaigners were allowed prime television time to present their arguments. Prior to the campaign, opinion polls revealed that 80 percent of the population supported a gun ban (Datafolha, 2005;Anastasia, Inacio and Novais, 2006); however the actual referendum result was 64 percent against a ban as reported by the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) (IANSA, 2005a).An analysis of the referendum and of the lessons that can be learned from this event in Brazil's history is timely given that the Brazilian gun lobby is now even more organised than in 2005 and that they have proposed significant legal reforms to Brazil's gun-control legislation. Among other changes, the proposed legislation (PL 3722/12) would reduce 36This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Armed Violence and the Politics of Gun Control in Brazilthe age requirements for purchasing firearms from 25 to 21 years old, extend the rights to purchase guns and the amount of ammunition that can be purchased -one person would be entitled to own up to nine firearms and purchase up to 5400 bullets per year, creating as Fernandes, Vicente and Silva (2015) put it, 'a dream' for the gun and ammunition industry.This article investigates the factors that influ...