Brazil’s elected left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, wants to control the firearms of the population. The Minister of Justice and Public Security, Flávio Dino, presented a draft decree with new rules for firearms.
The text prepared by Dino aims to reduce the number of firearms allowed for collectors, sports shooters, and hunters (CACs).
This is a way that Lula has adopted to control firearms in the hands of civilians.
The socialist president wants to overturn all the decrees of the former conservative president Jair Bolsonaro, which allowed increased buying and selling of guns to the Brazilian population.
Bolsonaro’s decrees allowed shooters to acquire up to 60 guns, including 30 restricted-use firearms (such as rifles and machine guns) and 30 permitted-use firearms (such as pistols and revolvers). Additionally, hunters were authorized to register up to 30 guns, including 15 restricted-use and 15 permitted-use.
In the draft submitted to Lula, Dino proposes stricter regulations for CACs, including reducing these limits. There is also a provision for categorizing shooters into three levels and defining that the maximum number of permitted-use firearms that this category is entitled to be 16.
President Lula da Silva also wants the Federal Police to take control of authorizations for firearm use to control information on individuals who own guns. The Federal Police is under the control of one of Lula’s ministers.
Currently, the Brazilian Army is responsible for firearm control and does not share information with the government. But Lula wants to concentrate all information on civilians who own guns in his hands.
On his first day in office, Lula issued a decree mandating that all firearms be registered with the Federal Police. The originally scheduled due date was pushed out to May 3.
Guns that weren’t registered earlier this month were confiscated.
