Politicians invoke Blumenau tragedy to point fingers at opponents

“A child’s grave is not a platform”, said deputy Marcos Pollon (PL-MS), via Instagram, on the night of this Wednesday (5). The call for attention was a reaction to several statements throughout the day in which members of the federal government and the Legislature invoked the tragedy in Blumenau (SC) to justify their views on social problems and hold political opponents accountable.

Minister Silvio Almeida, of Human Rights and Citizenship, for example, resorted to a series of clichés from the disagreements between the left and the right to point the finger at the rightists as guilty of the trend of shootings in schools. “Are we going to wait to reach the numbers of the United States, which is a country that is a model for many people there? Are we going to wait to reach 300 attacks a year in schools? With these people worshiping weapons? With these people wanting to carry out a coup d’état in Brazil? Wanting more is that people die of hunger? What children and adolescents will have a future?”, he questioned.

The Minister of Justice and Public Security, Flávio Dino, commented on the tragedy in Blumenau, blaming “hatred in society” – a consequence, for him, of “a deregulated internet”. The Lula government seeks to promote internet regulation and, to that end, recently released the draft of a proposal for a substitute for the Fake News PL. “The collection of causes that lead to the expansion of tragedies is very visible: proliferation of hatred in society, including a deregulated internet and irresponsible companies; incentives to armament and the ideology of death; Nazi and neo-Nazi groupings”, he said via Twitter.

Deputy André Janones (Avante-MG) stated that the killer in Blumenau “was inspired by another killer: Jair Bolsonaro” and that “Bolsonarism must be criminalized as well as Nazism”.

Senator Paulo Paim (PT-RS), president of the Senate Human Rights Commission, told the website Congress in Focus that “when hatred and discrimination are preached, as seen in the past government, this can only have harmful results for society”. “We need to act, as a parliament, to help change this reality.” Paim added that he will propose to the President of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG), the establishment of mixed commissions in Congress to speed up the analysis of proposals on safety in schools.

Right-wing parliamentarians also spoke out about the Blumenau case, attacking the left and proposing improvised solutions on the very day of the fact. Deputy Julia Zanatta (PL-SC) filed an urgent request for the vote on a project by Deputy Paulo Bilynskyj (PL-SP) that makes the implementation of armed security in public and private schools mandatory. She also claimed to have filed a Constitutional Amendment Project (PEC) to reduce the legal age in Brazil from 18 to 16 years.

Deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG) said on social media that he signed the urgent request made by Julia Zanatta. The Minas Gerais parliamentarian also made a video criticizing the left and claiming that he alerted the Federal Police about an alleged digital organization formed by teenagers to plan mass murders. “The left, which should be fighting to stiffen the sentence for criminals, is simply trying to find someone to blame and making a political stage on top of a child’s coffin. All because of political disaffection. Unlike them, me, deputy André Fernandes [PL-CE] It is [o deputado] Filipe Barros [PL-PR] We informed the director of the Federal Police about a certain organization that is happening on several digital platforms, where teenagers and pre-teens are working together to be able to commit barbaric crimes, as happened today in Santa Catarina,” said Ferreira.

Researcher says that immediate reactions do not give results

In your book “Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities” (2016), the American public safety researcher Jaclyn Schildkraue states that there are three basic factors usually cited as motivations for shootings soon after they occur: weapons (either the possession of them or the lack of weapons to protect oneself), health mental violence or media violence (video games, movies, series, etc.) None of these factors, according to her, is demonstrably decisive in explaining the tragedies.

In general, according to her, proposals for legislative change and the adoption of new public policies that emerge in the United States shortly after the cases almost always revolve around these three axes. However, they rarely have any proven social impact to prevent new cases.

“While some of these bills passed, many never made it past the submission stage. The flood of legislative responses to such incidents warrants further discussion on whether these bills really are effective or if they are just ‘cosmetic legislation’ “, says Schildkraue in one of his researches.

In another of her studies, titled “Mass Shootings, Legislative Responses, and Public Policy: An Endless Cycle of Inaction,” she studies the effects of proposals that emerge in the aftermath of tragedies to regulate guns or implement criminal background checks for gun purchases. of fire. “Although mass shootings give rise to particularly visceral reactions and demands for action in the public sector, the corresponding response from legislators is not able to produce any significant change”, says the researcher.

The gradual forgetfulness of the subject by the public may be one of the reasons why bills do not prosper. According to a 2020 US study published in the academic journal Criminology & Public Policythere is a noticeable pattern of online engagement for mass shootings, with a substantial spike in the first 24 to 48 hours of the event, which dissipates after 10 days.