Post shooting, Brazil looks itself in the mirror

No dia 23 de outubro de 2005, os brasileiros foram às urnas. Tiveram de responder a uma única pergunta: “O comércio de armas de fogo e munição deve ser proibido no Brasil?” Havia duas opções: sim e não. O “não” obteve 59.109.265 votos (63,94% do total); o “sim” recebeu 33.333.045 (36,06%).

Um resultado surpreendente, pois o Brasil é um dos países onde mais se mata e se morre com armas de fogo. E em 99% dos casos por motivos torpes. Brigas de botequim, brigas de trânsito, pequenos assaltos.

Antes do referendo, o Brasil foi bombardeado com uma campanha midiática gigantesca. Muitos argumentavam que a proibição feria a liberdade individual. O caso mais célebre foi o da revista Veja, que fez uma reportagem de capa intitulada “7 razões para votar não: a proibição vai desarmar a população e fortalecer os bandidos”. Tudo falácia e incentivada por companhias americanas. O jornalista brasileiro Leonardo Attuch, colunista da Istoé, de acordo com aljazeer.com, escreveu esta semana que os brasileiros apenas votaram contra o banimento de armas em 2005 "após uma ampla campanha de desinformação financiada por interesses privados".

O(a) repórter Kelly Hean investigou a votação do referendo e descobriu que a National Rifle association (NRA), a poderosa lobista pró-armas dos E.U.A, teria trabalhado silenciosamente nos bastidores aconselhando seus colegas brasileiros a argumentar em favor do uso das armas no Brasil. Naquele momento, a NRA chegou a enviar seus lobistas de Washington para São Paulo para assessorar o movimento pró-armas no Brasil. Alguns dos materiais de campanhas pró-armas mostrava Hitler, invocando a idéia de que o brasileiro teria o direito de armas para se proteger de "montros".

Leiam a matéria do colunista da Istoé, Leonardo attuch:

http://www.istoe.com.br/colunas-e-blogs/colunista/3_LEONARDO+ATTUCH

Abaixo um texto do site Aljazeera.com muito interessante sobre o uso de armas no Brasil. Vale a pena ler:

Rio de Janeiro has a well-earned reputation for being a violent city, but never before has the city or country seen a school massacre the scale of what happened last week.

"I thought school shootings only happened in other countries," one Brazilian man told me. "I never thought I would see the day it happened here."

Sadly, that day has now arrived. But now this country is moving to another predictable element to this story: Gun laws.

Only hours after the shooting Brazil’s justice minister, Jose Eduardo Cardoso, said he wanted to reinforce the national disarmament campaign, set for June.

And on Tuesday Brazil's senate will start discussing the idea of a bill, likely to be put to a national vote, banning the sale of hand guns and ammunition to non-law enforcement entities.

Photo: Headlines in the Brazilian press showed the horror of the shooting.

Brazil already has strict gun laws on the books restricting who can legally buy and carry guns on the street. The key word is legally. That word is not in the vocabulary of most bad guys.

Anti-gun groups in Brazil estimate there are between 15-20 million illegal firearms in the country, in all sizes and brands, most smuggled into Brazil through the Paraguay border.

And that is why in 2005 Brazil put to the voters a landmark referendum that asked a simple and straight forward question: “Should the commercial sale of guns and ammunition to civilians be prohibited?” Fifty nine million people (64% of the votes cast) said no. The measure failed after it looked as though in the run-up to the vote it would narrowly pass.

Only about two million Brazilians legally own guns, so what the vote equated to was 59 million people voted to uphold a "right" for two million users, even though there is no such right in the Brazilian constitution to bear arms.

So why would a country with so many people affected by gun violence vote to keep guns legal? That seemed odd to observers who analysed the vote afterwards.

Reporter Kelly Hearn investigated the referendum vote and discovered that the National Rifle Association(NRA), the powerful American pro-gun lobby, was allegedly quietly working behind the scenes advising their Brazilian counterparts how to frame their arguments as a "rights" issue and not a "gun" issue.

According to Hearn's reporting at the time, the NRA even sent one of their Washington DC lobbyists to Sao Paulo to advise the pro-gun movement in Brazil. Some of the pro-gun campaign material showed Hitler, invoking the idea that Brazilian’s need the ‘right’ to guns to always protect themselves from monsters.

According to this report in Foreign Policy in 2005, the NRA was making an international push to securee gun rights in key countries, including Brazil.

Brazilian journalist Leonardo Attuch, a columnist for ISTOE magazine, wrote this week that Brazilians only voted against banning handguns in 2005 after a, "wide campaign of dis-information financed by private interests".

On Monday I called the NRA national headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, USA, to ask them for a response, check the facts from 2005, and see if they had any thoughts about gun control in Brazil in light of the shooting in Rio.

I was transferred to a polite woman in the press office who told me to send an email with my questions. I did. I never heard back.

To this day, gun control advocates in Brazil credit the backdoor influence of the NRA as key to confusing the voters and swaying the 2005 vote.

It was a monumental defeat for the anti-gun movement, not only in Brazil, but also internationally.

But that was 2005. And now, here we are, six years later. There will be the inevitable debate of: Who kills? Are the people that pull the trigger and kill innocent people the problem? Or the gun in their hands? Or both?

Or does it even matter? Is that the wrong question to even start with?

Photo: Wellington Menezes de Oliveira, the Rio school shooter.

Consider the twisted and shady web of hand-offs that ultimately landed the pistols in the hands of Oliveira in the first place: Police say Oliveira bought the illegal pistols for the equivalent of $164 from two men, Charleston Souza de Lucena, 38, a locksmith, and Izaias de Souza, 48, who was unemployed.

The two men apparently threw in five bullets with the purchase, as a bonus. One gun, police have determined, was recorded as stolen years ago. The other gun has no record.

Both Lucena and Souza were easy to track down and quickly arrested by police. The men said they had no clue about Oliveira's deadly plan, they say they were just acting as intermediaries, selling the gun to Oliveira on behalf of someone else who illegally owned the guns.

Police have yet to fully identify or track down the alleged "other person".

But for their role in it all as "intermediaries", Lucena and Souza say they each received what is the equivalent of $18.95 for their work facilitating the sell.

Each man now faces between 4 and 8 years in prison for the sale of illegal weapons.

Would a ban on firearms have prevented this illegality? You can decide.

Here is where we are today: twelve innocent kids dead. More permanently maimed and clinging to life in a hospital ICU. The killer’s decomposing corpse in a Rio morgue; his family has fled Rio and refuses to claim the body. The original gun-seller unknown. Two "intermediaries" jailed for selling weapons so they could make a quick 18 dollars and 95 cents.

Based on the terrible scenes I saw at the funerals on Friday, countless parents, sisters, brothers, nieces, grandparents and dear friends of the victims now trapped in a forever hell that no future gun laws can solve, espeically after the fact. For them, the reality is that it's too late.

They ask one question nobody seems to have an answer to: Why? The next question is: When?

Follow Gabriel Elizondo on Twiiter @elizondogabriel

Source: http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2011/04/11/post-shooting-brazil-looks-itself-mirror