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The PSB called today the Federal Supreme Court to suspend a resolution of the government of Jair Bolsonaro that reduced to zero the tax on the import of revolvers and pistols. The change was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation on Wednesday 9 and will take effect from January 1 of next year. Today the tax is set at 20%.
The resolution is signed by the Executive Steering Committee of the Foreign Chamber of Commerce, a secretariat linked to the Ministry of Economy, by Paulo Guedes, and is one more norm that seeks to make access to weapons more flexible: Bolsonaro’s campaign promise and the flag of the government. .
In June, Status showed that arms and ammunition lobbyists and businessmen have a constant presence in Bolsonaro’s government offices – from January to April this year, at least 73 hearings and meetings were held with representatives of the sector. The Sou da Paz Institute has already listed at least 20 regulatory acts that facilitated access to weapons and ammunition.
Bolsonaro already defended in a ministerial meeting the idea of ’arming the population’ to avoid a ‘dictatorship’, referring to state and municipal decrees that contradicted the president in the fight against the new coronavirus. “I want everyone to be armed! That the armed people will never be enslaved,” he said, in the video released by the Federal Supreme Court.
The PSB affirms that reducing the tax on revolvers and pistols would represent a “clear setback” in the security of the population by facilitating access to arms, in addition to being a harmful measure for the collection of the Brazilian arms industry.
“The new rate will decrease the amounts collected by the government in arms imports, negatively affecting the transfer of resources to other essential areas, such as, for example, the fight against the new coronavirus,” says the party. “The measure also harms the national market, since the rule affects only the price of imported products. In this way, the Brazilian arms industries lose competitiveness in the market, impacting national economic and industrial development.”
The manufacturer Taurus minimized the effects of the rate reduction on the company’s accounts, but said that “unfortunately” the measure will lead the company to prioritize the foreign market “at the expense of investments that would generate employment and wealth in Brazil.”
On another, more technical point, the PSB points out that the resolution that reduced the rate is illegal, since the jurisdiction to exempt from the tax requires the edition of ordinary law. The Chamber of Foreign Commerce would only be competent to change the rate and not to zero. “It is a federal tax, within the competence of the Union, and the Executive Branch has the option of changing its rates by administrative act,” he said.
