Brazil has much more stringent gun laws than the USA and a much higher homicide rate. So much that the Brazilians are scrambling to reverse ineffective gun laws so they may again, purchase a firearm for self defense.
-Geaux
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The irony? Brazil actually has much stronger gun control laws than the U.S.
A man walks into an elementary school with two handguns. Within minutes, more than thirty children are dead or wounded.
This isn’t Newtown, Connecticut, but Realengo, a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On April 7th, 2011, Wellington Oliveira murdered twelve children and wounded twenty others. The tragedy sparked a national conversation on gun violence, a huge problem in Brazil.
On Wednesday, in reaction to a different massacre, President Obama proposed a series of gun control measures he says will reduce gun deaths in America. Whether a recalcitrant Congress and vocal gun lobby will let those proposals become law is unclear.
Fact number 1: Brazil has the most gun murders in the world (around 36,000 people in 2010), but the U.S. has the most among industrialized nations (9,146).
Fact number 2: in 2011 Brazil was the number one supplier of guns to the U.S.
Brazil: a case worth studying
“More people are killed every year in Brazil through intentional violence than anywhere else on the planet, including most of the world’s war zones combined,” says Robert Muggah, research director of the Igarapé Institute, a think-tank in Rio that studies the interaction between violence and the drug trade.
The great majority of these deaths, Muggah explains, are “concentrated amongst relatively poor to very poor, lower-class, often black or minority-type groups in densely populated, under-serviced areas known as favelas.”
In the U.S., we call them ghettos.
Despite the media spotlight drawn by tragedies like Newtown and Aurora, ghettos are where most of America’s gun violence takes place. America’s rate of gun murders is 3.3 per 100,000 people, the highest in the developed world. Brazil, whose worst favelas Muggah compares to conditions in Somalia or the Congo, has a much higher rate of 18.1.
The irony? Brazil actually has much stronger gun control laws than the U.S.
What the U.S. can learn from Brazil’s epidemic of gun violence
-Geaux
================
The irony? Brazil actually has much stronger gun control laws than the U.S.
A man walks into an elementary school with two handguns. Within minutes, more than thirty children are dead or wounded.
This isn’t Newtown, Connecticut, but Realengo, a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On April 7th, 2011, Wellington Oliveira murdered twelve children and wounded twenty others. The tragedy sparked a national conversation on gun violence, a huge problem in Brazil.
On Wednesday, in reaction to a different massacre, President Obama proposed a series of gun control measures he says will reduce gun deaths in America. Whether a recalcitrant Congress and vocal gun lobby will let those proposals become law is unclear.
Fact number 1: Brazil has the most gun murders in the world (around 36,000 people in 2010), but the U.S. has the most among industrialized nations (9,146).
Fact number 2: in 2011 Brazil was the number one supplier of guns to the U.S.
Brazil: a case worth studying
“More people are killed every year in Brazil through intentional violence than anywhere else on the planet, including most of the world’s war zones combined,” says Robert Muggah, research director of the Igarapé Institute, a think-tank in Rio that studies the interaction between violence and the drug trade.
The great majority of these deaths, Muggah explains, are “concentrated amongst relatively poor to very poor, lower-class, often black or minority-type groups in densely populated, under-serviced areas known as favelas.”
In the U.S., we call them ghettos.
Despite the media spotlight drawn by tragedies like Newtown and Aurora, ghettos are where most of America’s gun violence takes place. America’s rate of gun murders is 3.3 per 100,000 people, the highest in the developed world. Brazil, whose worst favelas Muggah compares to conditions in Somalia or the Congo, has a much higher rate of 18.1.
The irony? Brazil actually has much stronger gun control laws than the U.S.
What the U.S. can learn from Brazil’s epidemic of gun violence
