Santiago Caputo hides behind a wall, next to a door. He is absolutely focused, as if he is about to bet his life. After about five seconds of static, it spins at full speed and passes through the frame. That’s where it starts to pull. One two three. In total there are six shots, which seem to hit the target. Then an order comes from behind, in a martial tone. “Move.” Javier Milei’s star advisor runs as if he had just landed in Normandy, puts one knee on the ground, changes the magazine and waits for another indication. “Come on, pull, pull.” Caputo follows as instructed, and then the image fades to black. Mission accomplished.
However, the libertarian strategist is not really on a battlefield, the wall is just a half shadow tied to a bamboo and the targets are paper figures. The only real thing, one could say, is Caputo’s passion for weapons, perhaps a holdover from his youthful fantasy of becoming a spy. He now puts that drive into practice every time he goes to that room in the heart of San Telmo, where he (and other space popes like Daniel “El Gordo Dan” Parisini and Milei’s personal lawyer, Francisco Oneto) practice shooting in the academy of former grenadier Sebastián Flores.
However, perhaps more striking than the images of the President’s men with a gun in their hands is the meta-message. The dissemination of these videos, especially that of Caputo, who likes to cultivate his profile as a black monk, is a sign in itself. Behind the reels for the networks playing soldiers, behind the tree, a forest appears. And there is a government that not only flirts aesthetically and discursively with bringing weapons to the population, but does much more than that. Including the half-sanction of a controversial law that went almost unnoticed, just like a weapon that could be revolutionary, that was purchased by the national State and several provinces, that has the active advertising of members of the Government, is being left out of any type of regulation. and some consider it controversial (see box). There is a show but also business between Milei’s gunmen.
Prepare, aim. “I am definitely in favor of the free carrying of weapons. Those states that have free carrying of weapons, whether progressivists like it or not, have many fewer crimes than where you have honest people forced to be defenseless.” Milei said this on several occasions, even when he was already a deputy and candidate for President, despite the fact that evidence shows that violence increases when more weapons are introduced into a population. His running mate thought something very similar. “This is not the old west, what we want is for good citizens to be able to defend themselves. I have the legitimate user credential. I am a fork holder. If a citizen meets the requirements, the State should grant him possession,” said Victoria Villaruel, who revealed that she had weapons in her possession (as C5N later published, they would be a 9mm caliber Sig Sauer and a 45 caliber Heckler & Koch semi-automatic).
It must be clarified that this position is not at all original. Murray Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, had defended the thesis of the free bearing of arms since the last century. “Like drugs, gambling and pornography, weapons should also be legal,” Milei’s hero wrote. Between Rothbard’s postulates and the fact that for the American “alt right” led by Donald Trump, the right to bear arms is sacred – regulated in the famous Second Amendment -, it was to be expected that Milei would defend the same. He even included a more moderate version of these ideas in his campaign platform last year. Article 17 of that text from La Libertad Avanza, almost identical to the one they had presented in 2021, says: “Regarding the possession of firearms, we propose the deregulation of the legal market and protecting their legitimate and responsible use by citizens.” Ricardo Bussi, Milei’s candidate in Tucumán, directly made a spot with the topic. “Yes to the legal and free carrying of weapons,” he said in the clip, with whose images he later wallpapered the streets of his province. Rodolfo Eiben, Milei’s ally in Córdoba, also proposed the same in the provincial elections. And this was only in 2023: two years earlier, the day Milei became a deputy, in a confusing episode one of his guards almost pulled out a gun from the Luna Park stage.
These ideas now entered a new stage. Caputo, Parisini and Oneto began to show themselves in their shooting classes, which also raises the question of who else from the Government will be training under the orders of Flores but, unlike their colleagues, prefers not to show it. And they weren’t the only ones. The deputies José Luis Espert, Lilia Lemoine and María Celeste Ponce, the Secretary of Worship Nahuel Sotelo, the Buenos Aires legislator Juan Esper and the vice president Victoria Villarruel posed with weapons, most of them at an event by Bersa, the only private company that produces weapons in the country and that even has a spot made by a libertarian representative.
Fire. “The right to arm oneself should be a natural right, although today it perhaps has a bad reputation.” Those words were pronounced on October 1 in the Chamber of Deputies, by the libertarian Alida Ferreyra, famous for her visit to the repressor Alfredo Astiz. That day, a project promoted by Patricia Bullrich to regulate the possession of weapons had half a sanction, with 142 votes in favor. “Persons who have firearms for ‘civil use’ that lack registration or whose registration has become illegal, must appear within 360 days of the entry into force of this document before the National Agenda for Controlled Materials (ANMAC) , in order to obtain the relevant authorization,” he says, in what the ruling party translated as targeting those who have inherited a weapon from a family member. According to this project that has already been submitted to the Senate, any person who presents a weapon during that period will be regularized by the State, unless that weapon or that person registers a criminal record. But if that does not happen, the State will “launder” said object, regardless of its origin.
This measure, which went unnoticed in the middle of an intense year, sparked controversy. The Peronist deputy and former director of the National Registry of Weapons (Renar), Matías Molle, raised objections in that same session, pointing to an aspect that he considers crucial: to be a legitimate user you must undergo strict control and only after approval You can access a weapon, but with this law the path would be the opposite, first the weapon is presented, it is regularized and then comes the check. “With this we allow people who we do not know what mental conditions they are in to have a weapon, it could be someone who ends up shot in the street,” said Molle, who is concerned about the 360-day period available to complete the procedure. of legitimate user once the illegal weapon is presented.
The former head of ANMAC, Natasa Loizou, also agreed. “It is a tricky project, they gave a twist to illegal possession and not to promote disarmament. That is, before you had the criminal amnesty because you handed over the weapon and not because you had a weapon. There are actors in the sector who are interested in discouraging disarmament so that they can access unregistered weapons,” he said in dialogue with Perfil.com. And criticism came not only from the opposition. Gabriel González Da Silva, in charge of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Unit in the Investigation of Illegal Crimes Related to Firearms, also pointed out in this sense. “This is a kind of money laundering and technically a criminal amnesty for those who are currently involved in illegal possession of weapons. Not only will their crime be ‘erased’, but unusually they will be allowed to regulate their illegal weapons and keep them to do whatever they want,” the prosecutor wrote, and also pointed out that the underlying problem is that Argentina does not have criminalized weapons. criminally the crime of arms trafficking. Civil organizations such as the Argentine Network Against Disarmament and CORREPI also expressed their concern.
It is not the only striking thing that the Government did in the world of weapons. In February, the ANMAC chaired by the bullrichista Juan Pablo Allan – famous for his participation in the so-called “Gestapo” episode of Macrism – repealed the “citizen opposition process.” This regulation established that for a period of 15 days on the ANMAC website and in the Official Gazette for one day the name, ID and type of weapon of those requesting possession or carrying must be published, with the idea that if If there was a possible victim of gender or domestic violence, the case could be detected in time.
But that no longer exists. And here another doubt appears: since officials, deputies, senators and provincial legislators are authorized to carry (that is, to carry loaded weapons on the street), there is a question that arises. Will the “armed arm” of the Government be receiving shipments? It is impossible to know, also due to another butterfly effect: this – or many other issues – can no longer be found out through a request for access to public information. This happened after NOTICIAS revealed that Milei has only four dogs at Quinta de Olivos (while the libertarian swears he sees five), a publication that motivated presidential anger that ended up transforming that law. There is one thing that is certain: the Milei gunfighters show is going on for a while.
