Privately owned guns doubled to 3 mi in Brazil from 2018–22

The amount of guns in private civilian and military collections in Brazil more than doubled from 2019 to 2022, adding up to 3 million. Last year alone, more firearms were purchased than in 2018, 2019, and 2020 combined. The figures can be found in a survey by institutes Igarapé and Sou da Paz.

The surge is linked to changes adopted during former President Bolsonaro’s administration to facilitate access to firearms, especially among hunters, sport shooters, and collectors—CAC in the original Portuguese acronym. Under his government, the rules for carrying loaded guns were relaxed and powerful weapons became more widely available.

As a result, military agents are no longer Brazil’s main owners of private collections in the country. Their place has been taken by CACs.

In 2018, before the changes implemented by Bolsonaro, private collections comprised 1.3 million guns in Brazil, with 47 percent belonging to military agents, the report says. At the time, CACs held 27 percent of the arsenal. Another 26 percent belonged to civil servants, ordinary citizens with a registration for self-defense, and subsistence hunters. By 2022, the share of this total owned by CACs had jumped to 42.5 percent.

The new private arsenals of civilians and military personnel in the country are described as “an immediate effect of the lack of control brought about by over 40 regulations—decrees, ordinances, and normative instructions—enacted between 2019 and 2022, mostly setbacks on control measures in force until then,” the document released Monday (Feb. 13) reads.

The institutes also warn that the elevated rate of purchase contrasts with the government’s capacity to consider these requests and supervise the market, which has a direct impact on public safety. In 2018, CACs purchased 59 thousand firearms, compared to 430 thousand in 2022—over seven times higher.

Melina Risso, research director with the Igarapé Institute, points out that, besides having more firearms, CACs now own a more powerful and less tightly controlled collection. “Access to weapons was made significantly more flexible, but we didn’t see a proportional increase in the control we had before. For example, shooters had classes. Access to other types of weaponry depended on their progression in the sport. In the last four years, we have ended this progression even for large caliber weapons. Their collection has become more powerful,” she said.

In the view of Carolina Ricardo, executive director at Sou da Paz, the weapons market is also based on supply and demand. The greater circulation of weapons, she noted, is noticed by organized crime, which seeks ways to profit from it. “Being aware of the larger supply of weapons, criminals organize themselves to exploit this movement. It’s yet another channel for them to profit.”