You’ve heard of beating swords into ploughshares; how about swapping weapons for wheels? The government of Uruguay – a country plagued by rising rates of gun crime – is offering a different sort of green new deal: give us your illegal guns, and we’ll give you a shiny new bicycle.
Roughly half of the million firearms in circulation in Uruguay, which has a population of just 3.3 million, are unlicensed. Announcing the new scheme in January, the Interior Ministry said it was a step towards ‘a more harmonious coexistence, where differences are resolved through dialogue and negotiation’, and that it would coincide with a parliamentary bill to criminalize possession of unregistered weapons.
