{"id":34513,"date":"2020-02-10T10:02:27","date_gmt":"2020-02-10T16:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=34513"},"modified":"2020-02-10T10:04:34","modified_gmt":"2020-02-10T16:04:34","slug":"34513","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=34513","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

How Venezuela\u2019s Good Citizens Were Disarmed is a Lesson For Us<\/a><\/p>\n

When I was a little girl in the early 1990s, my father worked in the energy industry and often flitted off to South America. He brought us back postcards and chucher\u00edas from this faraway land of Venezuela, describing it as the most picturesque nation in Latin America. The nation was then awash in oil wealth, the highest growth rate in the region, boundless education opportunities, fine foods and world-class beaches.<\/p>\n

It seemed a mystical paradise where nothing could go wrong. Until it did.<\/p>\n

When I stepped foot into the embattled nation a year ago to cover the burgeoning humanitarian crisis, none of my experience in war zones prepared me for the calamity that seemed to get worse with every step across the Colombian border. Venezuela had sunk into a violent humanitarian crisis. There was next to no rule of law…….<\/p>\n

C\u00facuta, a city straddling the Colombian and Venezuelan border, had become the stuff of nightmares: a microcosm of the conflict burning Venezuela alive. Its citizens had become unable to defend themselves or their families from danger and economic ruin.<\/p>\n

And the Venezuelans are the first to tell you that so many of them willfully surrendered their right to bear arms in the lead-up to the 2014 crackdown. They told me this as clear words of warning.<\/p>\n

\u201cVenezuela is paying the price for the gun ban. The civilians are unable to defend themselves from criminal actors and from this Maduro regime\u2019s abuses,\u201d activist and university teacher, Miguel Mandrade, 34, said from the fog-laden, barren city of San Cristobal. \u201cThe uprising would have taken a different path and a different result if civilians had the right to defend themselves with the firearms they once owned.\u201d……..<\/p>\n

Some 4 million have fled the profoundly impoverished nation that, as this was being written, was still led by socialist dictator Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. Meanwhile, the millions left languishing inside Venezuela\u2019s borders are starving and without critical services and medical care. Homicide and crime rates are escalating as the inflation rate soars. The government has unleashed its forces and proxy militias to wage war on a troubled and defenseless population.<\/p>\n

But the trigger of gun prohibition wasn\u2019t pulled in an instant. Over several years, Venezuelan authorities chipped away at individual gun rights.As they did so, crime rates crept higher and higher.<\/p>\n

How They Lost Their Freedom
\nIn 2002, Caracas enacted its first effort to restrict gun ownership, placing the National Armed Forces as the body to oversee the regulation of all firearms. In 2011, then-President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez launched a public disarmament campaign as part of his Presidential Commission on Disarmament, which was supposedly aimed at reducing gun violence. Resolutions were cemented to prohibit possessing guns during cultural and sporting events, as well as on public transportation and construction sites. A 12-month moratorium was also put in place with regard to issuing gun permits.<\/p>\n

The following year, Caracas banned the commercial sales of guns and shuttered the doors of firearms stores across the country. It was mandated that only military, police and security forces could legally own and buy guns.<\/p>\n

Then, in 2012, Maduro signed into law the Disarmament and Arms Munitions Control, which carried the explicit objective to \u201cdisarm all citizens.\u201d Ch\u00e1vez initially ran a months-long amnesty program urging Venezuelans to swap their arms for electrical goods; however, only 37 surrenders were recorded, while more than 12,500 guns were seized by force.<\/p>\n

The government held grandiose decimation displays in the streets by bulldozing firearms en masse in front of large crowds in a bid to demonstrate their commitment to supposedly end gun violence.<\/p>\n

In 2014, a further 26,000 firearms were confiscated or crushed\u2014coincidentally, Venezuela clocked in as having the world\u2019s second-highest homicide rate that very same year. Each year that the gun-control reins were pulled tighter, murder rates increased.<\/p>\n

In 2001, according to gunpolicy.org, 6,568 homicides were recorded in Venezuela. By 2014, that number had jumped to 19,030.<\/p>\n

Not-so-coincidentally, the black market in weapons also began to boom, with an estimated 6 million illegal guns in the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe market works through international borders, in maritime and land areas, and the government itself has been a gun provider,\u201d said Walter M\u00e1rquez, a Venezuelan historian and former National Assembly Representative. \u201cThe government took legal weapons away from private people, disarming all those who could oppose it.\u201d……<\/p>\n

Venezuela is a Lesson Americans Must Understand<\/p>\n

Venezuela serves as a reminder that gun control can serve as a gateway to despotism. Some contend that not only is Venezuela suffering the consequences of failing to fight the ever-inching gun-control measures, but also of failing to create a culture that understood the importance of having a right to keep and bear arms.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Venezuelan population trusted the government at all times that it would always use its authority within certain boundaries, and whenever it got out, we thought it would be solved by democratic or legal mechanisms. Our political and public behavior confirmed our cultural naivety in this sense,\u201d said Javier Vanegas, 29, a Venezuelan teacher. \u201cWe are paying the price of not having had a strong gun culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before the 2012 changes, there were only eight registered gun stores scattered across the nation of 31 million people. The process for law-abiding citizens even to obtain a legal gun permit and a firearm was a months-long ordeal hamstrung by protracted wait lines, high costs and demands for bribes. Only one department, which operated under the Ministry of Defense, had the authority to issue civilian permits.<\/p>\n

The collectives ruthlessly oppress opposition groups, giving Maduro a cosmetic cover. When we saw them, we ran for cover.<\/p>\n

In late 2017, when Venezuela was in the clutches of its spiraling economic catastrophe, Maduro announced he would distribute some 400,000 arms to his patriots\u2014claiming a U.S.-led coup was coming\u2014and the civilian population was left as sitting ducks. Since April of that year, hundreds of Venezuelans protesting the government, armed with little more than stones and paper signs, have been shot or have disappeared in retaliation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf citizens had access to guns, and if they had been armed since before the arrival of Chavez, it would have been, at least, a powerful obstacle to the socialist agenda,\u201d said Vanegas. \u201cSocialism thrives in chaos. The perfect tool for chaos in most of Latin-America is criminality. If the people had had the tool to defend themselves, instead of resorting to more state power to end the criminality (an end the government never intended to give), then, of course, it would have made a huge difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, he said, the daily life of the unarmed Venezuelan has been shaped by crime.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have stopped going out. Businesses and businessmen and women went broke or closed shop and left. The youth began to be fearful of spending time out in the city,\u201d Vanegas said. \u201cI personally had one family member and two friends kidnapped for ransom.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stuff of nightmares quickly became normal to the likes of Vanegas, who reflected that his complacency has been shattered as his beloved country has fallen apart. Scores of ailing Venezuelans told me that even before the protests sparked five years ago, calling the police to report a crime entailed long wait times and pressure to bribe officers not only to come, but to process the case per the book. Now, even making such a call is basically useless.<\/p>\n

One person I met on my travels in the region whispered in hushed tones that those who dare keep an old gun beneath their bed\u2014or those who have the finances to find one on the black market\u2014risk the punishment of 20 years behind bars. This person confessed that he kept an old revolver that once belonged to his grandfather. He worried that if he used it to save his own life, the Maduro regime would then come to take him away to prison.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Venezuela\u2019s Good Citizens Were Disarmed is a Lesson For Us When I was a little girl in the early 1990s, my father worked in the energy industry and often flitted off to South America. He brought us back postcards and chucher\u00edas from this faraway land of Venezuela, describing it as the most picturesque nation … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rkba","category-safety"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34513"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34517,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34513\/revisions\/34517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}