Brazil’s Gun Owners Must Re-Register All Firearms by End of March

Brazilian collectors of weapons, professional shooters, and hunters (CACs) are facing the deadline for a new rule that requires them to re-register their firearms by the end of March.

JP News reported that the new rule was “instituted by the Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino,” and any CACs who refuse to comply will be “committing a crime against the disarmament statute.”

Federal deputy Paulo Bilynskyj blasted the new rule, suggesting that Dino has created a new crime before a law creating such a crime has passed:

When ordinance 299 created a new crime, the crime of not re-registering your firearm, this ordinance, this new crime, violates the principle of legality, which is the basic principle of criminal law. There is no crime without a previous law that defines it. Now, in Brazil, we have inaugurated a new type of crime. This modality is the crime created by ordinance of the Ministry of Justice. Absolutely unconstitutional.

The Pledge Times noted that Dino’s rule that guns be re-registered was issued February 1, 2023, giving CACs 60 days to comply. By February 10, 24,246 gun owners had re-registered 38,513 firearms. The figure of 24,246 represents roughly 3.6 percent of Brazil’s gun owners.

The re-registration is done with the Federal Police.

On January 2, 2023, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that Brazi’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, used time during his first hours in office to “[issue] sweeping changes to tighten the country’s firearms laws and reverse looser rules imposed by his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.”

Lula issued a decree suspending new registration of guns for “hunting and sport.” The decree also prohibited gun owners “from transporting loaded weapons, suspends new applications for gun clubs and reduces the number of firearms permitted per individual from six to three.”

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. AWR Hawkins holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.