Hidden beneath tarpaulins in the backyard of a house in Danao City,
Cebu, Lito puts the finishing touches on a replica .45-caliber Colt
Officer’s Model pistol. It will join the more than 600,000 illegal guns
in circulation in a country where the homicide rate outstrips the US.
The money he makes from guns supplements his income as a farmer and
helped Lito, 52, send two children to college. Still, he thinks often of
the suffering that may come from a craft he learned from an uncle and
older brother.
“I worry that the firearms I make may be ending up in the wrong
hands,” said Lito, a soft-spoken man dressed in loose jeans and
slippers, who asked not to be identified in full given the nature of his
work. “If there were other opportunities, I will stop making guns.”
Lito, who will sell the pistol that took him a month to make for
P6,000 ($133) – about three-quarters of the monthly minimum wage – is
one of 6,000 illegal gunmakers the Danao government is seeking to
regulate. City officials want to move them into legalized factories
before demand for illicit firearms picks up ahead of nationwide
elections in 2016 in a country with a history of vote-related violence.
Fifty-eight people were slain in a massacre in Maguindanao six months
before the May, 2010, elections.
Gun-control laws and economic growth forecast to exceed 6 percent
this year, one of the fastest rates in Asia, have failed to put a major
dent in crime. The nation faces entrenched Muslim rebellions and a
Maoist guerrilla group, not to mention hired killers and more than 100
private armies, according to Amnesty International. Easy access to
weapons exacerbates conflict, saps economic potential and deters
tourists, according to Arjan Aguirre, a political science instructor at
the Ateneo de Manila University.
The government will investigate at least 13 police officers manning
the Firearms and Explosives Office for allegedly licensing about 1,000
AK-47 rifles with bogus documentation, the Office of the Ombudsman said
in a statement recently. The military recovered the firearms, which were
originally issued to a local security agency, from Maoist rebels after
clashes in the Mindanao region, it said.
“When you have a weak state, conflict is inevitable, and loose
firearms play a key role in insurgency areas,” said Aguirre, who
co-authored a 2012 study on gun proliferation. “We have weak law
enforcement and that’s where patronage politics and crony capitalism
come in. The first ones to own a gun are the rich, then the criminals,
and ordinary people who feel the police can’t protect them.”
The craftsmen of Danao’s cottage industry range from teenagers to the
elderly – the majority of them male. The city made guns as early as the
Philippine-American war at the start of the 20th century, when
gunsmiths in the hills were said to have supplied Cebuano rebels with
weapons, according to historian and author Michael Cullinane. During the
Japanese occupation in the 1940s, Danao supplied Filipino guerrillas in
Cebu province with handguns locally known as paltik, he said.
The gunsmiths thrive even as police regularly raid backyard
operations, Councilor Jose Thaddeus Roble, who heads the peace and order
committee in the city of 119,000 people, said in an interview in his
office on Oct. 1. Risking jail terms of as long as 40 years, gunsmiths
often post bail and return to making weapons.
“Most of our gunsmiths are farmers who go into the business of making
guns because of poverty,” Roble said. “They use the money to feed their
families. Instead of judging them, we pity them.”
About 900 gunsmiths have expressed interest in being legalized and
the city is seeking to enlist about 3,000 people to join a cooperative
it wants set up by 2016, he said. That would mean firearms are
manufactured with valid serial numbers that will help authorities track
them.
“The government can’t play cat-and-mouse with these gunsmiths
forever,” Roble said. “The skill was passed from generation to
generation, so we might as well help them get in the fold of the law.”
From Smith & Wesson revolvers and Para-Ordnance 1911 pistols to
Uzi submachine guns, the homemade copies risk ending up in the hands of
crime syndicates and political private armies, Roble said.
There are as many as 610,000 illicit firearms in the Philippines,
according to gunpolicy.org, a website hosted by the Sydney School of
Public Health. Civilians in the Philippines, which has a population of
more than 100 million, own about 3.9 million licensed and unlicensed
firearms, it said.
Even though many killings go unreported, the Philippines still has a
homicide rate of 8.8 for every 100,000 people, three times the Asian
average and almost twice that of the US, according to a 2013 report from
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. In the US the rate is
4.7, the UN said.
The Philippines does not provide specific data on gun- related
homicides. Offenses involving women and minors are significantly under
counted and most police stations don’t have official desk blotters to
record crimes, according to findings released by the national police in
June.
“Our system remains feudal and we have no rule of law,” Ramon
Casiple, executive director of the Institute for Political and Electoral
Reform in Manila, said in an interview. “That’s where the image of the
Wild West comes from,” said Casiple, who advises an elite police unit
that deals with high-profile crimes on how to modernize.
The economy may soar but if a lot of people are marginalized and impoverished, you’re more likely to get problems,” said Abad. “That inequality and a loose gun system, plus our relatively more democratic system, are an even more potent brew for social problems.”
Aquino has enacted a measure that tightened a three-decade
gun-control law, limiting firearm ownership to Filipinos at least 21
years old in gainful work. The law, which took effect in January, offers
a six-month amnesty to unlicensed gun owners.
Exemptions have been frequent in the past and with local and national
elections due to be held in 2016, the imperative to act is growing.
“We need to finish negotiations with illegal gunsmiths and set up the
factories by 2016,” Roble told village captains during an informal
meeting at City Hall on Oct. 1. “Otherwise our efforts will have been
for nothing in case a new mayor comes in after two years.”
Backyard gunmaker Lito sees no reason to stop his business though it
can be difficult to hide it from neighbors, especially with the noise
generated when he’s drilling metal under the cover of tarpaulins. He
expressed an interest in joining a legal cooperative if set up.
“I get nervous when I see a cop in the neighborhood because I don’t
want to get caught,” he said. “But I will keep making guns while I can
because that’s the work that I’ve come to know.”
