Brazil’s New President Revokes Predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s Pro-Gun Policies

Less than a day into his presidency, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil suspended new registrations for guns, forbade the transportation of loaded guns, and reduced the number of guns a person can legally own to three.

Breitbart News reported that Lula, as he is popularly known, assumed office on Sunday and signed several decrees undoing core Bolsonaro policies, most prominently reimposing old gun control provisions.

The Wall Street Journal noted that Lula’s reversal of Bolsonaro’s pro-gun policies is meant to give the new administration time “to rewrite the country’s 20-year-old gun laws.”

In 2018, Bolsonaro ran on making guns more accessible to law-abiding citizens for the purpose of self-defense. As a result, “by November 2021, Brazil had registered a total of 2.3 million firearms, up 78% from 1.3 million when he first took office in 2019.”

On December 23, 2022, the Washington Post reported that the murder rate in Brazil fell 27 percent from its high in 2017. That means it declined over the course of five years which contained Bolsonaro’s four-year term; a term in which “private gun ownership…[grew] at least sixfold.”

The Post did not link the decrease in homicides to the increase in privately owned guns.

Reuters observed on December 13, 2022, that President-elect Lula “pledged to ‘disarm’ an increasingly gun-toting country where personal firearms have become a symbol of Bolsonaro’s conservative base.”

He began the process of making good on that pledge Sunday, just hours assuming the office.

Seventy-seven-year-old Lula said, “Brazil does not want more guns: we want peace and security for our people.”

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 PhD 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.