How they Do Things Down South: Venezuela Aims to Restrict Gun Ownership the Week before Elections

CARACAS, VENEZUELA—Soaring gun violence has motivated Venezuela’s National Assembly, the South American nation’s parliamentary government controlled by “allies of Hugo Chavez”, to greatly expand restrictions on gun ownership in the country.  These measures will see a blanket prohibition on public carry, an ammunition ownership cap of 25 rounds and ban anyone younger than 25 from owning a gun. The current laws on the books do not indicate age restrictions or bullet limits. Gun laws.

Escalations in crime, specifically rises in violence in the nation’s capital city of Caracas, has been pushed to the forefront of political campaigning in the run up to the September, 26 parliamentary elections. A research organization, The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, reports that murders increased 10 percent from last year in Venezuela while the state-run National Institute of Statistics maintains that Venezuela’s homicide total was 21,132 in 2009. Rifle.

Publicly, Chavez has pointed to the influences of capitalism, video games, television and other media sources as the genesis for the country’s crime epidemic and lawmakers have reprimanded Venezuela’s most widely circulated newspaper El Nacional for running photographs of corpses piled up in a Caracas morgue.  El Nacional has since been banned from publishing “violent images.”

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