Mass shooting in Brazil kills 8 with both suspects killing themselves.

Students pray near a vigil for the dead. Reuters. 

Two suspects killed themselves after a mass shooting in Suzano, Brazil, which left 8 people dead besides the suspects. Reuters. Though Brazil has among the highest crime rates in the world, they only rarely face school shootings like this one. The two suspects were armed with a revolver, axe, crossbow and compound bow. The suspects, a 17 year old and a 25 year old, shot and killed a car rental agent and then drove to the school in the stolen car. While they they shot and killed 7 additional people including 5 students. At least 10 more were injured in the attack. At the end of the rampage the younger suspect, Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, killed the older one, Luiz Henrique de Castro, before killing himself. 

My Comment:

Video of this attack is available on the internet through the typical sources. I won't post it here for obvious reasons but I have seen it. It looked like the attack involved the axe/hatchet more than the crossbows and other weapons. It's obviously extremely graphic so I won't link to it here. It does show the start of the attack in fairly good detail. 

These men seemed to have a strategy that seemed to have worked to some degree. The first attacker walked behind a group of students, pulled out a revolver and shot and killed at least three people. He then continued on into the school while the second attacker posted up with an axe and the bows and waited after pointlessly hacking at the three obviously dead victims. As more people tried to flee from the 1st attacker by using the entrance, the 2nd attacker used his hatchet (maybe? It's hard to tell if he was armed or not given the quality of the video) on the fleeing students. Most of them seemed to have no idea what was going on and were easily hit by the guy with the hatchet, though the wounded were able to get away. I don't know which attacker was which in the video. 

I usually don't like to post stories about school shootings since I believe media coverage spreads these kinds of attacks, but I do if I have something important to say. In this case I think there are quite a few lessons to be learned here.

The first thing I thought when I saw the video is that the 2nd attacker could have been easily overwhelmed by the crowd if they had thought to fight back. The only people that fought back against him were the people being actively attacked by him but it everyone had ganged up on him he would have been done for. Indeed, he was almost trampled down by the students completely by accident and the plan to use the various bows failed because of it. As it stands now his attack mostly failed but it could have been stopped cold if people had just fought back. Doing so would be going above and beyond and it was clear that people were panicked and worried about the guy with the gun but it would have likely saved lives. 

I also know that this attack will be used to support gun control in Brazil. But it is also a great example of why such laws don't work. Brazil is in the process of loosening their gun control laws but their laws are still very strict. It is still extremely hard to get a legal gun in Brazil but somehow the suspect managed to do it. And even if they had failed to get their revolver, they still had plenty of weapons. People would have still died in this attack. It's unclear if the suspects got the revolver legally or not but that should come out in time.

The attack also shows that weapon choice doesn't matter that much. For all the complaints about AR's and pistols, this attack involved a .38 caliber revolver. It just shows that even a slower reload doesn't really matter if nobody is fighting back. I have always said that you could use a break action shotgun and kill double digit people if nobody is willing to charge you or no one is armed. A six round revolver with speedloaders is slightly quicker to reload than a break action shotgun but even that is slow compared to most modern rifles and handguns. It didn't matter in this case and it won't matter anywhere else. As always it comes down to response time or the suspects giving up and killing themselves, like they did in this case. 

I do hope that this attack doesn't change the perception of gun rights in Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro has taken great steps to make guns more available for civilians for the purpose of self defense and given how insane crime is in the country it seems likely that easing restrictions will save lives. Indeed, if someone had been armed in this case it's likely that the 2nd attacker could have been killed very easily since he was only armed with the hatchet after he foolishly left his bows on the ground. 

I think this attack also proves that school shootings aren't just an American phenomenon. It's just that our school shootings get international attention and 24 hour national coverage while mass shootings in other countries, especially school ones, do not. I mean, do people even remember the mass shooting in Crimea last year that killed 19 people?

Indeed, that case had a lot of similarities to this one. In each case attackers were able to kill a large number of people and get ahold of firearms in countries with strict gun control. They used weapons besides the typical AR or semiauto pistols found here in America and both faded from the news very fast. When it happens in another country, the American media just doesn't cover it the same way...