Guns, guns and guns

Coincidentally, last week there were dramatic shooting incidents in the two countries of which I am a passport-holder, the Netherlands and Brazil. In Brazil, a deranged 23 year-old killed 12 children at his old high-school on April 7^th, in Rio de Janeiro; in the Netherlands, another deranged young man opened fire in a mall in the small city of Alphen aan den Rijn on April 9^th (not far from where I live). In both cases, the shooters killed themselves on the spot after the massacre.

Now, both countries are going through a ‘how could this happen here?’ process. Obviously, urban violence is not in any way an unknown phenomenon in Brazil, and in Rio de Janeiro in particular. But a school shooting is something unheard of in the country. In the Netherlands people are equally shocked, as this goes against their (largely justified) image of the country as a civilized, reasonable, safe place.

The obvious question to be asked, and which has been asked relentlessly, is: how could these two deranged men come in possession of guns? There should be some mechanism in place to prevent crazy people from legally owning guns (the Dutch shooter had ownership permits for 5 different fire weapons, and was a member of a shooting club). The Brazilian case is a bit more complicated, as it is extremely easy to get hold of guns by all kinds of informal, irregular and illegal ways (the man who sold the gun to the Brazilian shooter is now under arrest). But again, the obvious (counterfactual) conclusion to be drawn is that these tragedies would have been avoided if the shooters had not had firearms at their disposal.

Gun possession is of course the object of heated discussions, especially in the United States, where it seems impossible to have a rational debate over the issue. But rather than engaging in more theoretical argumentation, let me bring to the fore what has been happening in Brazil in the last 3 years, when a new statute with stricter regulations for gun possession and stricter control was implemented, along with a campaign encouraging people to hand in their guns: homicides have dropped 12%. It may not sound like much, but in absolute numbers it corresponds to about 5.000 fewer people killed – now, that sounds like a lot! Clearly, this is the ultimate proof that fewer guns entail a safer society, which seems so utterly obvious and yet is vigorously contested by firearms supporters.

For more information on what’s been done in Brazil, check the website of a great NGO which has been working on decreasing the availability of guns and changing the ‘gun-mentality’ in Brazil for more than 10 years, Sou da Paz (here in English). (As it turns out, a high-school friend of mine is one of the founders of Sou da Paz, which makes me extra proud…) There is of course still a looooooong way to go, but the results obtained so far indicate that it is possible to change an undesirable situation even when it is so firmly entrenched and connected to other complex societal problems; the practical results speak for themselves (5.000 people!). In a world with fewer guns, at least some of the shootings such as those which took place last week in Brazil and in the Netherlands (and so many others elsewhere) might not be taking place at all.