The Undersecretary for Crime Prevention, María José Gómez, warned that the Surrender your Weapon campaign is one more opportunity, together with the police operations and the new Weapons Law – which provides more tools to control and supervise weapons and takes charge of modified blank weapons – which will allow weapons of any kind to be removed from the streets, through voluntary and anonymous denunciation.
According to figures from Carabineros, with whom the campaign is carried out, of the total homicides that occurred in 2021 (794) -135 less than 220-, 53% used a firearm (423).
Along these lines, Undersecretary Gómez thanked the Pentecostal evangelical pastor, Juan Carlos Reyes, for his willingness to become a trusted agent, to inform his congregation about this campaign and alert the dangers of having unregistered weapons in a home. The Undersecretariat hopes that leaders of all faiths and confessions can become trusted agents who inform their parishioners of the dangers of having non-regularized weapons in their homes and invite them to surrender them anonymously and voluntarily to Police.
“Today there are some 60,000 stolen or lost weapons and we have another 200,000 that belonged to people who have died and that their relatives have not regularized. We want citizens to understand the risk of having an unregistered weapon in their home, which can constitute a danger to the family by accident, or that they are stolen or robbed and end up in the hands of criminals,” said Undersecretary Gómez.
Pastor Reyes, who leads a congregation in the Pudahuel commune, affirmed that it is essential to have security within families, and warned that weapons that have belonged to deceased relatives can fall into the hands of criminals if they are not regularized. “We are trusted agents so that citizens can understand that the fewer weapons there are, the fewer crimes there will be,” he said.
In her turn, the Prefect for Control of Arms and Explosives (OS11), Commander Paola Muñoz, indicated that the Police are permanently working on the recovery of these weapons. “Carabineros calls on citizens to hand over these weapons and remove them from circulation, in a totally voluntary and anonymous process,” he specified.
The “Deliver your Weapon” initiative began in 2010 and has since been permanently relaunched or intensified. Between 2010 and 2021, Carabineros received a total of 36,229 voluntarily surrendered firearms in their units throughout the country. The flow has continued so far this year. Thus, in January 2022, the uniformed police detachments received another 259 weapons.
