“The logic of the left is always the same: If a crazy guy uses guns to kill people, the solution is to take guns away from people who have nothing to do with what happened,” said Rogério Mendonça, deputy leader of the governing bloc in the lower house of Congress. “Now imagine if a decent person had been armed at that school. They could have stopped the attack from ending in the bloody way it did.”
SÃO PAULO—When a gunman slaughtered 16 schoolchildren in Scotland in 1996, Britain effectively banned handguns. Australia, Canada, and Germany also tightened gun controls in response to their own brutal school massacres over recent decades. New Zealand is vowing tougher measures, too, in response to this week’s massacre in two Christchurch mosques.
But as Brazil reels from one of its worst-ever school shootings, the response from President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing administration and his supporters this week has been the opposite: What Brazil needs, they say, is more guns.
In a Columbine-style massacre near São Paulo on Wednesday, two young men killed eight people, mostly students at their former school, shocking a nation already accustomed to endemic and barbaric violence.
By Samantha Pearson