Post shooting, Brazil looks itself in the mirror

[naaman fletcher]

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2011/04/11/post-shooting-brazil-looks-itself-mirror

Brazil is a country still very much grieving, and for good reason. It was last Thursday, just before 9am, when a 24-year-old mentally ill man named Wellington Menezes de Oliveira walked into a packed middle school classroom in the working class neighbourhood of Realengo in Rio de Janeiro and starting executing students who were barely teenagers.

....

Reporter Kelly Hearn investigated the referendum vote and discovered that the National Rifle Association (NRA), the powerful American pro-gun lobby, was allegedly quietly working behind the scenes advising their Brazilian counterparts how to frame their arguments as a "rights" issue and not a "gun" issue.

According to Hearn's reporting at the time, the NRA even sent one of their Washington DC lobbyists to Sao Paulo to advise the pro-gun movement in Brazil. Some of the pro-gun campaign material showed Hitler, invoking the idea that Brazilian’s need the ‘right’ to guns to always protect themselves from monsters.

According to this report in Foreign Policy in 2005, the NRA was making an international push to securee gun rights in key countries, including Brazil.