Brazil's tough laws on guns have flaw

By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers

	ANDRE VIEIRA / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Camila Magalhães Lima, featured in a gun-control campaign, was shot and paralyzed on a Rio de Janeiro street.
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The new measure raises the minimum age for gun ownership in Brazil to 25 from 21, severely restricts carrying handguns in public and requires background checks of potential gun buyers. It makes cross-border gunrunning a felony and — most controversially — calls for a referendum Oct. 2, 2005, to determine whether to ban handgun sales in Brazil.

Brazil's Congress passed the measure late Tuesday, ending a six-year fight, and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is expected to sign it by the end of the month.

"Without any doubt, today we are really doing something about gun violence," said Camila Magalhães Lima, 17, who was shot and paralyzed in Rio at age 12. Magalhães Lima, caught in a 1998 shootout between fleeing thieves and private guards of a jewelry store as she walked home from school, was a featured victim in the gun-control campaign.

Brazil's next step — cracking down on black-market gun sales — is a formidable one. Handguns flood into Brazil hidden in containers arriving from Miami or across Brazil's porous borders with Paraguay and Bolivia.

According to statistics compiled by the anti-gun group Viva Rio, Rio police seized 77,527 firearms used in crimes committed between 1951 and June 2003. Two-thirds of the guns were unregistered.

Guns remain widely available despite a police crackdown last year, a street dealer who works in Rio's outskirts said yesterday.

Bloody Brazil Brazil's murder rates are the world's highest for a country not at war, according to the World Health Organization: • About 40,000 Brazilians a year die in homicides, most due to gun violence. • By comparison, guns kill about 29,000 Americans a year. • Because Brazil's population is a little more than half the U.S. total of 292 million, its gun-death rate is actually more than double the U.S. rate.

Brazil's gun lobby, led by Forjas Taurus, based in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and one of the world's largest gun makers, is expected to undertake a high-profile campaign to defeat the 2005 referendum.

Forjas Taurus is the parent company of Miami-based Taurus USA and had a sister-company relationship with U.S. gun maker Smith & Wesson in the 1970s. It bought out the Brazilian operations of Italian gun giant Beretta in 1980.

Gun opponents are confident they will win the referendum. Public-opinion polls show Brazilians oppose legal gun sales, said Jessica Galeria, Brazil's representative for the International Action Network on Small Arms.

"The gun industry will be fine," Galeria said. "Seventy percent of sales are to police, the military or for export."

One elderly gun-shop owner wasn't so sure. The owner, who demanded anonymity, said existing gun laws, which are much weaker, have already pushed most buyers into the illegal market.

"Nobody is buying anything" legitimately, he said. "There are so many documents needed today in Rio that no one buys, only the soldiers."

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