Citation(s) from the GunPolicy.org literature library

Dreyfus, Pablo, Benjamin Lessing and Júlio Cesar Purcena. 2010 ‘The Brazilian Small Arms Industry.’ Small Arms in Brazil: Production, Trade, and Holdings; Special Report No. 11, p. 30. Geneva: Viva Rio, ISER, and the Small Arms Survey, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. 1 September

Relevant contents

Legal Production and Trade

Brazilian-made small arms - particularly handguns - and not military-style automatic weapons smuggled into Brazil, make up the majority of small arms related to criminal activity.

In 1998–2006, for example, 139,100 small arms were seized in the three important Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and the Federal District (Brasília), with a clear predominance of Brazilian-made handguns (Câmara dos Deputados, 2006, pp. 338–40).1

This finding runs counter to what was once conventional wisdom - in part circulated by the small arms industry itself: that criminals use military-style foreign-made small arms to commit crimes while law-abiding citizens use registered Brazilian-made small arms for legitimate self-defence.

In reality, Brazil's own small arms manufacturing companies produce a large percentage of the guns that are responsible for the country's astronomical levels of armed violence.

Source cited:

Câmara dos Deputados. 2006. Relatório da Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito Destinada a Investigar as Organizações Criminosas do Tráfico de Armas ('CPI do Tráfico de Armas'). Brasília: Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito.

ID: Q3367

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