Knife and Gun Crime

When I told Brazilian friends about Brian Paddick’s campaign to get knives and guns off London’s streets, they expressed surprise that young hoodlums and even some schoolchildren in the British capital walk around with knives. I was able to say that I have had experience of that myself; a couple of years ago, I was mugged only yards from my home in Tower Hamlets by four Somali youths armed with what looked the the contents of their mothers’ kitchen drawers.

Guns Brazilians do understand. As in most of Latin America (not to mention the United States), guns are omniprescent. The police all have them (and many of them wear bullet-proof vests, too). So do security guards at the doors of banks and up-markets businesses. Unfortunately, the criminals have them too — not just the drug barons, but the guys who do hold-ups by the roadside. There are certain crossroads in greater Fortaleza that are notorious, and drivers race across them without stopping at red traffic lights. Almost every day there are reports in the paper of innocent victims shot dead. The gun culture is so pervasive that there are accidents too. This week, a young man who was angry at a slight his girlfriend had received from another man brought out his gun to show his mother how he would chase after the man – but succeeded in shooting dead his mother instead.

I thought I was being witness to a hold-up myself this morning. Suddenly on the pavement in front of me, I saw a guy legs akimbo and with a pistol drawn, while standing obliquely to him was another man with a rifle, with which he was slowly panning the street. But then I realised they were covering the pasage of a courrier with cash bags walking to a security van. Securicor in London are wimps by comparison.