Then the Brazilian gun lobby, which previously had emphasized the desirability of gun ownership, began running advertisements that instead suggested that if the government could take away the right to own a weapon (though Brazilians have no constitutional right to bear arms), it could steal other civil liberties. This argument took gun-control advocates by surprise, and on voting day, 64 percent of Brazilians voted against the gun ban. “We gun-control groups failed to anticipate this idea of focusing on rights,” admits Denis Mizne of Sou da Paz, a Brazilian public-policy institute.The demand for sovereign individual rights generally does take socialists by surprise--they're just not conditioned to give that any credence, other than to decry it when they're out of power, and crush it when they're in. But writer Joshua Kurlantzick missed one other critical determinant: fear of the police, which I explored, along with other factors, in "Brazil Nuts."
Sunday, September 17, 2006