In the wake of the nursery shooting, gun violence has attracted unprecedented attention in Thailand

Source: Global Times

According to the Bangkok Post reported on October 24, after the shooting of the nursery school in Utaisawan Town, which shocked the world, the Thai government stepped up its efforts to crack down on illegal firearms, and the CIB put forward a number of suggestions such as annual qualification reviews of gun owners to reduce gun violent crimes. The October 6 daycare shootings killed 38 people, including 22 children, more than some vicious mass shootings in the United States. The issue of gun violence worries the Thai public. For how to reduce gun violent crime, many experts and scholars have put forward many suggestions from the system to the action. The Thai government has also announced that it will amend the relevant laws as the situation changes.

Shootings are 'no longer strange'

The killer had previously been suspended for drug involvement, so why wasn't his gun confiscated? If his gun has been confiscated, why can he buy it so easily? Why is there still no effective policy to regulate homemade guns and gun modifications? - After the shooting at a nursery in Utai Sawang township, Thailand, the Bangkok Post and other Thai media issued "torture" questions about gun violence in the country.

"Shootings are no longer new to Thai society." After the shooting at a nursery in Utai Sawang township, Ji Shanabhorn, a criminologist at Rangsit University in Thailand, said. Thailand is known as the "Land of Smiles". The Global Times reporter found that in this country that takes tourism as a pillar industry, the overall is safe, and the people are mostly kind, but gun violence crimes appear from time to time. According to the Bangkok Post, in 2018, there were more than 60,000 gun-related cases in Thailand. After a series of blows, that number dropped to 30,000 pieces in 2020.

On October 9, in Nongmo Lampu Province, Thailand, Thai Prime Minister Chan-o-cha Chan-o-cha extended condolences to the families of the victims of the mass shooting at a kindergarten. (Visual China)

Many shootings in Thailand have been linked to military personnel and militants. On September 14, three weeks before the shooting at a nursery in the town of Utai Sawang, a 59-year-old male civilian at an Army Military Academy in Bangkok shot dead two colleagues and wounded one. In June 2021, a retired soldier shot and killed a 54-year-old patient at a hospital near Bangkok. Before that, he also shot and killed a convenience store clerk. In November 2019, about 10 militants attacked a checkpoint in Yala province, killing 15 people, including police.

Although mass fatal shootings are rare in Thailand, gun violence occurs from time to time between couples, family members, neighbors and even co-workers. In February 2020, a gunman killed his ex-wife and injured another person in a Bangkok shopping mall. In August, two gangs shot at each other near a supermarket in Ubon Ratchathani, killing two people. A student in Bangkok brought a homemade pistol to school and killed a classmate during a computer class.

The high incidence of gun-related cases is closely related to the high gun ownership rate in Thailand. In terms of gun ownership per capita, Thailand has the highest number of ASEAN countries and is second only to Pakistan in Asia. According to a 2017 survey, Thailand's total population is about 70 million, but there are as many as 10.34 million firearms, of which more than 6.22 million are legally registered and the rest are illegally held. That means 15 out of every 100 people in Thailand own a gun. In fact, Thais may have a higher number of guns. Thai officials responsible for compiling weapons data said that since the introduction of the gun ownership law in 1947, all gun data in Thailand has been manually registered, and the data is held by different local governments, and the central government data is incomplete.

Tan Puenpa, a senior fellow at the Thailand Institute of Development, said Thailand averaged 3.91 gunshot deaths per 100,000 people. According to data from the World Population Review, a US think tank, Thailand ranks 15th among countries in gun-related death rates and second in Southeast Asia, second only to the Philippines. According to research from the University of Washington, there were more than 3,000 gun-related homicides in Thailand in 2016, with 4.45 deaths per 100,000 people.

Complicating matters further, Thailand's gun and drug problems are intertwined, fueling social unrest. Thai police said areas with a high incidence of drug-related cases are usually also areas with a high incidence of gun-related cases. The murder shooter at the nursery in Utai Sawang township, who started taking drugs from middle school, was suspended in January after he was found to be in possession of methamphetamine. Thais fear that the drug epidemic will increase the chance of crime. After the nursery shooting, a 34-year-old man in Nak Khan province tried to kidnap his 7-year-old child by breaking into a school with a gun after taking drugs and taking drugs.

The relevant laws cannot be described as lax

In Thailand, it takes more than 250 days to evaluate the safety performance of infant bottles; If you want to get a gun license, the whole process will not take more than 86 days, and the cost is only 5 baht per gun - Chen Puenpa, a senior researcher at the Thailand Development Institute, recently posted an article to illustrate the problem of gun violence in Thailand. Thailand's Ministry of Home Affairs, which is responsible for registering gun licenses, has set up more than 900 offices across the country for people to apply for.

Gun licenses, while easy to obtain, are not the most important reason for Thailand's high gun ownership rate, perhaps the biggest factor in this phenomenon is "individual" laws and regulations, and the resulting black market. In fact, Thailand's gun control laws are not lax, and the country has published more than 30 gun-related laws. According to Thai laws and regulations, citizens must be at least 20 years old to legally purchase guns, and only for specific purposes such as self-defense or hunting. To obtain a gun license, Thais must undergo background checks that include income and criminal history. Licensed gun dealers have a quota on the amount of firearms and ammunition they can sell each year, and civilians must pay a 40 percent import tax to legally buy firearms. Illegal possession of a gun carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of 20,000 baht.

However, under the Firearms Welfare Scheme, all state agencies in Thailand that purchase firearms for their staff for self-defense, hunting, etc., can place orders with the Ministry of Home Affairs and receive significant discounts. To a certain extent, this breeds corruption, leading some public servants to make profits by "buying low, selling high" weapons. Picard, a Swiss independent researcher who studies the arms trade, has conducted fieldwork in Thailand. He said it would cost $2,000 to buy a Glock Type 19 semi-automatic pistol from a licensed Thai dealership and would have to wait six months, but a police officer could buy the same gun for as little as $600. If the security personnel sell the guns they buy through government channels on the black market, they will make a significant profit. On October 20, police in Nonthaburi province, Thailand, arrested a policeman suspected of stealing more than 150 pistols. He said he stole two or three pistols at a time and then sold them. By the time of his arrest, he had sold nearly a hundred pistols.

In addition to imported guns, the Thai gun black market is also full of homemade guns that sell for only 6,000 to 8,000 baht, which is much lower than the registered general guns (15,000 to 30,000 baht). Some weapons experts say that if they are willing to take risks, almost anyone can buy guns illegally through social networking sites. Some Thais say guns can be bought within a day or two through the black market.

"The issue of guns partly reflects Thailand's history." Chambers, a scholar at Naresuan University in Thailand, said the country has seen more than a dozen coups since 1932, which has somewhat increased the circulation of guns and weapons in society.

Thailand also has an entrenched gun ownership culture, and few people in the country have pushed for legislation banning guns. Similar to the United States, many Thais vigorously defend their gun rights, believing that good people can do good with guns. In Thailand, guns represent power, prestige and money to some extent. On the country's news channels and Youtu video sites, it is common to see people holding guns to take a stand in public, or waving guns during restaurant fights, and even men showing off their pistols to women on the side of the road while driving, not knowing whether they are intimidating or flirting. Bangkok's old neighborhood of Wang Blaha is a concentrated embodiment of Thailand's gun culture. Many first-time visitors will be surprised to find that the streets are lined with gun shops, some of which are famous for their history of firearms manufacturing. In Wang Burafa, cheap rifles cost $1,300.

Thai society's tolerance for gun violence is also growing, and TV dramas and others are fueling this trend. Thai TV dramas often portray the use of firearms as a means of venting anger, fighting for inheritance, and resisting oppression. "Sometimes when there is conflict, guns seem to be the solution to the problem, and guns make people equal." Savistan, director general of Thailand's Department of Correctional Services, said. In the "2.8 Thailand shooting" that shocked the world in 2020, a soldier stole a weapon from a military base, shot and killed his own commander and two others, entered a large shopping mall, took hostages and confronted the police, and was killed more than ten hours later. The incident killed 30 people, including the gunman, and injured 58. Thai police said the gunman carried out the attack because of a land dispute with the chief, and the gunman claimed he did so for "revenge."

In addition, Chen Puenpa believes that problems within the military and police agencies are also one of the reasons for the rise in gun violence crime in the country. There are numerous news reports that recruits are physically punished or even killed during training, and that they have easy access to weapons, which leads to the possibility of violence by those who are abused.

A number of expert recommendations have been adopted

In fact, over the years, the Thai government has taken a number of measures and actions to deal with the problem of gun violence. Six days before the nursery shooting, Thai police launched a nationwide operation called "Ghost Guns Season 2", which conducted raids on 126 locations, arrested 61 suspects, and seized 145 guns and nearly 9,000 rounds of ammunition. However, the crackdown has not fundamentally addressed the problem of gun violence in Thailand.

Agencies such as Thailand's Central Bureau of Investigation, as well as academics and crime experts, have made recommendations on the deeper causes of gun violence in Thailand, such as loopholes in laws and regulations, including re-examining the procedures for issuing gun licenses, revoking the licenses of those who have committed serious crimes, and conducting regular inspections of weapons and ammunition for gun owners.

The gun welfare program has led many officials to "hoard" guns. Thonnikul, a criminologist at Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University in Thailand, said under the scheme, officials must have firearms in possession for 3 years before they can sell them. She believes that the plan should stipulate that each person can only own one gun and that gun owners must sell or destroy their old guns before buying new ones. Other scholars believe that the import of firearms should be restricted, and the number of imported firearms must be consistent with the number of officials who really need to use firearms. If the number of officials who need to use firearms is already equal to the number of imported firearms, they cannot be imported again.

While revising existing gun laws is a top priority, there is a view that curbing gun violence should be pursued in both the short-term and long-term ways. The short-term strategy is that once the authorities learn that there is a history of drug use and gun crime by a former police officer, they need to find out if there are similar people in the police department to prevent the same tragedy from happening again. As a long-term strategy, the Thai government needs to conduct a mental health assessment of armed police officers at least once a year. For police and military personnel who come into daily contact with weapons, early warning signs need to be detected to determine whether certain police and military personnel are potentially dangerous and likely to use weapons to cause harm to others. Other experts have suggested creating a database to register people with drug use or other criminal records, as well as information about people who have posted threatening messages on social media, to prevent them from obtaining firearms.

Thankfully, in the wake of the October 6 shooting, the Thai government decided to take a number of measures to address gun violence, and many of the opinions expressed by these authorities and experts have been adopted. The Thai Government has also committed itself to amending a number of laws and regulations on gun control as circumstances change.