Arms Control

The National Voluntary Disarmament Campaign 2011 was launched in Rio de Janeiro, on May 6, one month after the Tasso da Silveira school shooting in Realengo that killed 12 teenagers.

Beginning in March, Argentina will reenact the National Voluntary Arms Return Program, which took more than 107,000 firearms out of circulation between July 2007 and December 2008. Activists say support from media is fundamental to the project's succes, and that a major challenge is restructuring the national weapons registry, which is managed by an organization with direct interests in the production and trade of firearms.

There are approximately 16 million guns circulating in Brazil today, almost half of them are unlicensed. Close to 30% of the guns seized under illegal ownership had been first purchased legally. Brazil´s Ministry of Justice, Congress and Viva Rio issued a series of studies compiling data on guns, where they started out, who has them, and who manufactured them. The study calls for increased controls.

Violence and poverty do not go hand in hand, but in countries where inequality is high we also find armed violence.  The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development inspired a
seminar on concrete practices and discussed strategies for combatting
armed violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Participants stressed
the role of research, monitoring and evaluation.

The data on gun deaths in Brazil remains the same, and the same sources have been used by a number of studies on the declining homicide rate in Brazil, but a recent study begs to differ. Showing a different picture and submitting claims of the effect of Brazil's celebrated Gun Law - the Estatuto do Desarmamento-  to renewed scrutiny, a study by the National Confederation of Municipalities has generated considerable controversy among specialists.

More centralized firearms data, less guns circulating, more guns seized, a 90% drop in gun sales and significantly less gun licenses issued, and more importantly, over five thousand lives saved in less than three years. These were some of the major advances resulting from Brazil’s gun control law enacted in December of 2003.

In deliberations in the United Nations since 2006, the project for a global, legally binding, arms trade treaty enters a new phase: determining the content and shape of the treaty, enactment is expected for 2012. Experts hope the treaty will bring arms trade out of invisibility and lower the negative impact of guns over civilians.

Preliminary findings of a Viva Rio and Brazilian Congress' Subcom Firearms and Ammunitions Control Office survey say that there is much to be improved in gun control in the country. Survey cites irregular data provision as key problem for gun control as a strategy to lower levels of violence.

New findings from a group of British universities suggest that soon pollen may tell us key facts about homicides today, connecting victims of gun crime to the perpetrators, by becoming indelible ammunition tags.

The Portuguese speaking nation, rich in Petroleum, has recently embarked on a gun collection campaign that has already collected 52 thousand weapons in nine  months. With two more years to go, Angolan authorities have ambitious plans.