Carlos Meneses Sánchez
Sao Paulo, Feb 19 (EFE) .- The latest decrees of the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, will allow having “an arsenal” of weapons at home, alerts in an interview with Efe Rafael Carneiro, lawyer for the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), who has turned to the Supreme Court to stop the ultra-right leader’s arms obsession.
Bolsonaro, captain of the Army reserve, made the purchase and use of firearms by civilians even more flexible through four decrees published last week, in his crusade to encourage “self-defense” as a way to combat crime .
“It really happens to be allowed to have an arsenal,” says Carneiro in a telematic interview with Efe.
The lawyer, who represents the PSB in this process, maintains that the texts “violate the Constitution” and collide with fundamental rights by “putting the life and safety of the people at risk”, so they should be overthrown by the Supreme Court.
In addition, they invade Parliament’s powers and generate “very great concern”, since the “security monopoly”, which is “one of the main functions of the State”, is withdrawn from the Public Power.
MORE GUNS AND MORE AMMUNITION AT HOME
The decrees, among other aspects, increase the maximum number of firearms for personal defense from four to six and exclude from the list of products controlled by the Army projectiles, machines to reload ammunition, chargers of any capacity, telescopic sights and compensators. back.
Furthermore, “hunters, shooters and collectors have a much higher limit for the acquisition of weapons and ammunition than they currently have,” Carneiro warns.
Likewise, the carrying of two weapons simultaneously is authorized.
“Various entities have already publicly demonstrated against these decrees, showing that they go against the global trend of reducing arms and ammunition by society,” he underlines.
And with the consequent risk that, when the new rules begin to apply, violent crimes will rise in a country that registers around 50,000 homicides every year, according to the opposition. On the other hand, since they are presidential decrees, they do not need to be validated by Congress for their entry into force.
Therefore, the only “way to correct this unconstitutionality is the judicial way, through the Supreme Federal Court (STF)”, asserts the lawyer.
As the legal representative of the PSB, which is part of the opposition to the Bolsonaro government, Carneiro presented on Tuesday this week an appeal requesting the suspension of those decrees before the highest judicial instance of the country.
The case will now be drawn between one of the eleven magistrates who make up the high court.
“We believe that, depending on the seriousness of the offenses, (the appeal) should be analyzed in a short space of time,” he predicts.
The flexibility of the bearing and the pose of weapons is one of Bolsonaro’s campaign promises, a nostalgic for the right-wing military dictatorships that reigned in Latin America during the past century and whose weapons model is the United States.
Since he assumed power in January 2019, Bolsonaro has promoted various measures to promote the “self-defense” of society.
Despite the fact that many of these initiatives have been downgraded or even overthrown by the Legislative and Judicial Powers, the registration of firearms in the country has tripled between 2018 and 2020.
In 2020 alone, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, sales grew by 90%, as Bolsonaro proudly announced.
However, Carneiro trusts that the Supreme Court will overturn those new rules again, as it did in the past when the Government decided to eliminate import taxes on revolvers and pistols.
“The Supreme Court has been frequently acted upon to restrain these unconstitutional acts and has given a celestial response to those requests,” he said.
The lawyer regrets, however, that, in these times of a pandemic, in which all the efforts of the public power should focus on covid-19, they have to “waste energy” with “such unconstitutional measures.”
In this sense, he recalled that the Government also sought during the health crisis to restrict the Access to Information and Data Protection laws.
“These decrees on arms, unfortunately, are not the first unconstitutional acts (published) recently,” indicates Carneiro, who also represents the PSB in two other appeals for the alleged “omission” of the Government in environmental matters. EFE
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(video)
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