Você Pode Ter Meu Pistola Quando Você O ergue De Minha Mão Fria, Inoperante

Brazilians decisivelyl rejected a national gun ban supported by - natch - their nation's elites.

Reading the piece, from an English-language Brazilian newspaper, it's interesting to see all the anti-gun assumptions that even their media uncritically accept as fact.

Interesting, but not surprising or unfamiliar.

The good news:

Sao Paulo, Brazil: From sprawling cities plagued by violence to the backwaters of the Amazon, Brazilians voted decisively yesterday to keep gun sales legal in the country with the world’s highest death toll from firearms.

In the nationwide referendum, about 64% rejected banning arms sales, the electoral court said, with more than 90% of the expected 122 million votes counted.

Media preconceptions? Why, sure!

Only 36% supported the ban, even though more than 36,000 people were killed by guns last year in Latin America’s largest country.

"Even though" Brazil has the world's second-highest per-capita gun violence rate, and the highest absolute death toll, Brazilians want their guns.

You'd have to be a news reportere not to see the absurdity in that statement.

We didn’t lose because Brazilians like guns. We lost because people don’t have confidence in the government or the police, Denis Mizne of anti-violence group Sou da Paz said.

Duh.

"The patient isn't coughing because he enjoys hacking up phlegm. He's coughing because it's a symptom of a disease!".

Guns aren't intrinsically "likeable" to everyone (although I enjoy recreational shooting quite a bit), any more than a hammer or screwdriver is "likeable". A gun is a tool you use to do a job - in this case, defend yourself from Brazil's surging mass of drug-dealing scum - the ones who are doing the killing.

Many voters had expressed concern before the vote that a ban would leave them defenceless against heavily armed criminals. Public confidence is low in a police force widely considered inefficient, abusive and corrupt.

Now, I'm interested in this next set of quotes:

This referendum . . . is not going to end violence, said Assis Augusto Pires (60), who voted against the ban in Sao Paulo’s wealthy Jardim Paulistano district, where high walls, electrified fences and private guards protect residents.

In Rio de Janeiro’s Rocinha shantytown, scene of a raging gangland turf war, Carlos Eduardo Ferreira, a 40-year-old electrician, said he was voting for the ban.

I am for the ban; I am for life. I’ve already seen kids hit by bullets here, he said.

So even though gun control is predominantly a cause of the privileged, and a 2/3 majority in a poor nation like Brazil would seem to indicate considerable support among the peasantry, it's interesting that the token pro-gunner in this piece is an upper-class fortress-dweller, while the anti is poor 'n plucky.

Fancy that - even though as the article notes a few grafs later...:

The ban failed in all 26 states and the federal district of Brasilia. Rural areas rejected it overwhelmingly.

...that the poor were the ban's biggest opponents.

The press is trying to cast it as a referendum on the current President, who is embroiled in a number of scandals, and who treat guns with the same patronizing ignorance as a typical Code Pinko:

I think that for an ordinary person to have firearms is not going to give security, so I voted ‘Yes’, [President] Lula said.

Many blamed the loss on a bribes scandal that has weakened Lula’s government and hurt his popularity.

Right.

2/3 of a huge, mind-warpingly and nearly-ungovernably diverse nation vote as one to reject a gun ban - over something as temporal, wonky and commonplace as a bribery scandal?

It's those crazy peasants and their "don't shoot me down like a dog" and their "where are the police when I need 'em?"

Don't they know their place?

Posted by Mitch at October 25, 2005 12:07 PM | TrackBack