Lessons from Venezuela firearm control:

During the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, in 1914, a disarmament decree in the Federal District was enacted, and later in 1919, a disarmament law was decreed, ordering every weapon owner to give them away to the authorities; the only exceptions were machetes and hunting shotguns. The official justification offered was to diminish crime, but the law was ultimately used to disarm the population and to prevent possible uprisings.[1] Historian Manuel Caballero argued that while Gómez's final intention was to prevent his enemies from obtaining weapons, the law contributed to avoid civil wars in Venezuela for the next century.[2]
In 2012 Venezuela banned private sales of firearms and ammunition hoping to lower crime rates. The army, police, and certain groups trusted by the government (colectivos) are exempted from the ban and can buy firearms from state-owned manufacturers.[3] In 2013 Venezuela stopped issuing new firearm licenses,[4] and in 2017 government banned carrying firearms in public places.[5] The government declared that more than 15,000 firearms were confiscated in 2018. Sixty disarmament centres were created in the country and the penalty for illegal firearm possession was raised to twenty years imprisonment.[6]
According to the government, the only people who should carry guns are government agents. Néstor Reverol, minister for interior relations and justice, claimed that strict gun control led to a reduction in crime and kidnappings in Venezuela.
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that tyranny inevitably results when a government exercises complete control of the economy through central planning. Over half a century later, beginning with Hugo Chávez’s revolution, Venezuela began its own road to serfdom by expropriating thousands of businesses and even entire industries. The more fortunate companies left before it was too late, while the businesses that remained were handed over to the Venezuelan military, under whose oversight they were neglected into ruins. In a typical demonstration of class warfare, the government publicly vilified these business owners as unpatriotic, greedy lackeys of American interests, claiming that Venezuela’s poverty had been a direct result of their existence.
Chavismo created an atmosphere of distrust in which no one felt safe enough to invest in Venezuela. More important, the courts were no longer the place to get redress. Since 1999, the Venezuelan judiciary had been systematically stacked with judges loyal to the executive. Twenty years after socialism took hold of the country, Venezuela has hit rock bottom on every possible development index. Today, 90 percent of Venezuelans are living below the poverty line and inflation rates exceed 1 million percent. Record numbers of children are dying from malnutrition, and nearly all of the country’s hospitals are either inoperative or in critical need of basic medical supplies. Frequent nationwide power outages have left, at times, up to 70 percent of Venezuela in darkness. Chávez’s socialist agenda purported to be in service of the entire nation, but as Hayek reminds us, “the pursuit of some of [the] most cherished ideals . . . [produces] results utterly different from those which we expected.”
Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian rule over Venezuela is the next piece of the Hayekian puzzle. Chávez’s hand-picked successor has further plunged the country into devastation. Hayek’s explanation of “Why the Worst Get on Top” in his seminal book is particularly helpful in understanding the current state of Venezuela at the hands of Maduro. In Hayek’s words, at some point a dictator has to “choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure,” failure meaning the loss of power over the lives of the people. This is the reason, Hayek argued, that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are more likely to stay in power in a society tending toward totalitarianism. This is, again, tragically accurate 75 years after the publication of The Road to Serfdom. Maduro and his inner circle have responded to the outcry for change from the hungry and desperate by unleashing ultraviolent revolutionary collectives in the hopes that millions will get the message, retreat to their homes, and watch — helplessly — as the night of dictatorship keeps falling upon them.