Dr. Lott’s Offer to Bet Other Academics on How Lula’s Gun Laws Will Impact Brazil’s Homicide Rate Gets Coverage in Brazil
Dr. John Lott’s offer to bet academics on how Brazil’s homicide rate will change with their new gun control laws has gotten some attention in Brazil.
Less access to guns, less crime? American expert contests and provokes with bet
John Lott, an American gun expert, shows, with examples from the Bolsonaro government, that stricter gun laws will not mean less crime.
An American economist pays US$1,000 (about R$5,000) to anyone who claims that Lula’s anti-armament policy, two years from now, will reduce the number of deaths from crimes in Brazil. In the US, none of the academics provoked by John Lott (an economist who heads the Crime Prevention Research Center — CPRC) accepted the proposal. Some, more cautious, want the terms to be clearer. But Lott is sure that stricter gun laws won’t mean less crime, and he takes the Bolsonaro government’s Brazil as an example..
One fact is that during the Bolsonaro government there was a drop in crime, along with the release of the purchase of weapons. While gun ownership increased sixfold, Brazil’s homicide rate dropped 19% in 2019 compared to the previous year, with 41,635 murders — the lowest rate in over a decade. In 2022, the number of homicides dropped even further, to 40,824 in the country..
Separately, they are numbers and facts. But Lott is convinced that criminality and weaponry are not directly related. And, according to Fox News, he personally challenged 12 fellow academics. Seven of the 12 researchers did not respond to the offer, while the other five did not accept the bet..
The CPRC head added that before Bolsonaro took office in 2018, “the homicide rate was 27.8 per 100,000 people — 5.5 times higher than the US rate” before dropping to 18.5 in 2021 — a rate the country has not seen since the early 1990s.
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Of the few responses the economist received, all were unanimous in saying that it was impossible to make this correlation between tough laws on gun ownership and crime, as there are countless factors that affect the final result in homicide, whatever the country analyzed.
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Lott recalled that the UK had much lower homicide rates than the US before they had any gun control laws. Once firearms were banned in 1997, British rates rose compared to the US.
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One of those challenged, David Hemenway of Harvard University, said Lott’s proposal was a “silly scam”. Homicides in Brazil, according to the professor, are affected by “dozens of factors”, such as “the economy, truces between criminal organizations, rates of gun smuggling and police effectiveness in law enforcement”.
