



Private gun ownership was banned in Venezuela in June 2012, but their homicide rate went from 73 per 100,000 people in 2012 to 82 per 100,000 people in 2015. A private organization, the Venezuelan Violence Observatory (OVV), puts the rate in 2015 at over 90 per 100,000 people. The BBC seriously repeats the Venezuelan government’s claim that the ban is an “attempt by the government to improve security and cut crime.” The ban was preceded by an amnesty to get people to turn in their guns. The video gives some idea of what life is like in Venezuela these days.

As the homicide rate was already rising before the gun ban and Venezuela is such a mess of a country, this increase in homicides is less dramatic than for the UK, Ireland or Jamaica, but yet again it is still evidence that the homicide rates were at least not favorably affected by gun ban.

Hugo Chavez became president of Venezuela in 1999. In that year, the homicide rate was about 25 per 100,000 people.

Additional data on Venezuela’s homicide rates are available here.

Starting in 2009, the newspaper El Universal reported that the Venezuelan government started a systematic effort to suppress information on the true murder rate. The police began telling “relatives of victims who are in the morgue of Caracas (Venezuela), not to make statements to the press in exchange for expediting the procedures to recover the bodies.”

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CPRC original research, gun bans

By johnrlott

