Opinion – Rodrigo Zeidan: People kill, but so do guns

Brazil’s two main problems are income distribution and violence. The rest is secondary. This week’s two tragedies, the slaughter by the State in Brazil and the slaughter of children in the USA, show how we need to review the entire approach to crimes in Brazil and in the world.

Obviously, this should not happen in this government, whose ideas about disarmament come from those who have watched many Westerns and think that it is enough to give a gun to a person to know how to defend himself. This is not true. Access to guns increases homicides and suicides and has no effect on crime prevention. Just like in a western, the chances of a passerby surviving a confrontation with a criminal with a gun is close to zero.

Public policy is not made with anecdotes about the guy who chased away a bandit because he had a “trezoitão”. You know the tired phrase that “guns don’t kill, it’s human beings that kill”? Not only is it wrong, it is scientific consensus that ease of access to weapons increases crime by a massive amount.

In an article in the leading economics journal, Duggan (2001) unequivocally showed how increased gun ownership leads to more homicides. Since then, numerous other studies have confirmed this fact. Worse, the effect is increasing since, as Braga and coauthors (2021) show, modern weapons are more lethal and fail less.

Restriction and disarmament work, whether in the US, in Brazil, or anywhere else. A number of countries have tightened the rules a lot more after massacres like the one in Uvalde. Australia, Germany, England, Canada, New Zealand and Norway, to name a few, have seen carnage like the one in Texas.

In Australia, after a citizen opened fire, killing 35 people in 1996, the government did much more than ban guns. It confiscated, forcibly repurchasing most of the weapons in the country. Many people, even without falling into the confiscation category, voluntarily surrendered their weapons to the state. The result? One of the safest countries in the world. Before, there was a massacre like this every 18 months. Since then, there has been only one tragedy.

And it’s not just murder. In an article by Anestis and Houtsma (2018), the authors showed that the difference in gun possession rates across US states explains 92% of the variation in the suicide rate. “Ah, but in Brazil we need more than confiscating weapons”. Yes, but Schneider (2021) showed that the disarmament referendum in Brazil alone reduced firearm murders by 12.2% and attempted murders by 16.3%. In Colombia, with a similar campaign, the reduction was more than 20%.

Disarmament is just one step. We need society’s trust in the government and vice versa, in addition to coordination between Powers. Medellín, in the 1990s, was one of the most violent cities in the world, with 380 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Today, the rate (between 20 and 25) is lower than that of the state of Rio, where almost 5,000 people were killed in 2021 (28 murders per 100,000 people).

It is possible to change. New York was a hotbed of crime in the 1970s. Copenhagen was plagued by gang attacks. But never, in any city in the world, does the solution involve the slaughter of citizens by the State. Nothing will come from this government. But where are the candidates’ proposals? We need public safety solutions. For yesterday.