Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the meaning of security for two different groups, namely: civil society activists promoting an anti-violence agenda, and gun lobbyists. It explores the implications of their discourses in relation to gun control and the impact these have had on the political economy of security.

Paper long abstract:

Brazil has the second largest firearm manufacturing industry in the world's western hemisphere, the US being the largest. It is a country delineated by social inequality, a society marked by fear of crime and an epidemic number of firearm related deaths. A civilian lead social movement started in 1997 aiming to reduce violence and the number of guns in the country, this resulted in the approval of a radical referendum, the first of its kind in the world, which asked the population whether firearms sales should be banned to civilians or not. This paper investigates the referendum by examining how the theoretical frameworks developed by Wacquant (2003; 2009) and Chevigny (2003) facilitate the understanding of factors that may have shaped the result of the referendum. The paper adopts a qualitative approach to explore not only the construction and dissemination of global gun proliferating myths, ideologies of crime, criminals and the criminal justice system but also to evaluate the detrimental effect of these issues on society. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with activists from pro-gun and pro-control lobbies and media content was analyzed.