The Minister of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) Gilmar Mendes suspended this Wednesday (all lower court processes that discuss the legality of the Lula government decree that imposed greater control over the population’s access to firearms.
Decisions already taken or that will be published against the measure issued by Lula will be immediately rendered null and void. The magistrate says that the measure seeks to avoid conflicting decisions in different courts of the country.
It also states that “in the Brazilian constitutional norm, there is no fundamental right to access to firearms by citizens and the acquisition and possession of firearms in Brazil”.
He also said that it is necessary to curb a “vertiginous trend of easing the norms for access to firearms and ammunition in Brazil while discussing new regulations on the matter.”
After taking office, Lula edited a decree revoking rules from the government of Jair Bolsonaro that facilitated and expanded access to weapons.
Lula’s decree suspended new registrations of guns by hunters, shooters and collectors (CACs) by private individuals, reduced the limits for buying weapons and ammunition for permitted use, suspended new registrations of clubs and shooting schools, suspended the granting of new registrations for CACs and created a working group to propose new regulations for the 2003 Disarmament Statute.
“In recent years, the Disarmament Statute has been the object of a series of successive regulations that had as their declared purpose the wide flexibility of the plexus of regulatory norms related to the acquisition and storage of weapons and ammunition, the requirements and procedure for registration and granting of possession of transit of firearms to the CACs and the requirements and procedure for registration of clubs and shooting schools, observing even an expansion of the situations in which the registration and registration of firearms could be waived”, noted the Minister .
“In short, there was a clear unconstitutional action in the sense of facilitating access to weapons and ammunition in the country, especially benefiting the category of CACs (with an increasingly lenient interpretation of who would fit in it), despite other constitutional legal interests relevant, such as the duty to protect life,” he continued.
The magistrate states that the issue of disarmament deals with “a topic of great potential to harm the highest legal and constitutional interests of an individual nature (such as life and physical integrity) and collective values of the first order, such as social peace and the Democratic State of Law”, which is illustrated by the “sequence of events that took place in the period between the end of the general elections and the terrorist attack on January 8, 2023, openly sponsored by arms groups”.
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