Yeah, the country has been an even shittier version of best Korea for quite some time now.
They got pissed off, so the Venezuelans got pissed on.
Don't piss off the Colombians!
There was an article specifically talking about it a couple years ago, but I can't seem to find it, here is what I currently have. There's a lot of fluff so I'll just post what I think is relevant.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/venezuelans-regret-gun-prohibition-we-could-have-defended-ourselves
Under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2012 enacted the “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law,” with the explicit aim to “disarm all citizens.” The law took effect in 2013, with only minimal pushback from some pro-democracy opposition figures, banned the legal commercial sale of guns and munitions to all - except government entities...
Chavez initially ran a months-long amnesty program encouraging Venezuelans to trade their arms for electrical goods. That year, there were only 37 recorded voluntary gun surrenders, while the majority of seizures - more than 12,500 – were by force...
Much of the crime has been attributed by analysts to government-backed gangs – referred to in Spanish as “collectivos” – who were deliberately put in place by the government.
“They were set up by the government to act as proxies and exert community control. They're the guys on the motorcycles in the poor neighborhoods, who killed any protesters,” said Vanessa Neumann, the Venezuelan-American president and founder of Asymmetrica, a Washington, D.C.-based political risk research and consulting firm. “The gun reform policy of the government was about social control. As the citizenry got more desperate and hungry and angry with the political situation, they did not want them to be able to defend themselves. It was not about security; it was about a monopoly on violence and social control.”
So while Venezuelan citizens were stripped of their legal recourse to bear arms, the “collectivos” – established by Chavez when came to power – were legally locked and loaded. Deemed crucial to the survival of the socialist dictatorship, the “collectivos” function to brutally subjugate opposition groups, while saving some face as they aren’t officially government forces, critics contend...
https://freebeacon.com/issues/socia...porters-outlawing-confiscating-civilian-guns/
Maduro plans to arm 400,000 supporters amid protests and unrest
The socialist leader of Venezuela announced in a speech to regime loyalists his plan to arm hundreds of thousands of supporters after a years-long campaign to confiscate civilian-owned guns.
"A gun for every militiaman!" Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro said to uniformed militia members outside the presidential palace, Fox News reported on Tuesday. The Bolivarian militias, created by Maduro's predecessor Hugo Chavez, already number in the hundreds of thousands and are being used to supplement the regime's armed forces. Maduro is boosting the number of armed supporters in hopes of keeping control over the country from what he labels "imperialist aggression."
The arming of Maduro's supporters comes five years after Venezuela's socialist regime outlawed the commercial sale and civilian ownership of firearms. Only the military, police, and groups like security companies can buy guns and only directly from one state-run arms company under the law passed in 2012, according to the BBC. The country recently doubled down on its gun ban through a combination of gun buybacks and confiscations in the summer of 2016.
So we have 400,000 people [at least] getting guns 5 years after a gun ban, and the government handing out the guns has no means to manufacture them or buy them, since they don't have the tools or resources to make them, nor the money to buy them, not to mention the arms embargo imposed by the US/NATO/OAS.
To make it a little more clear, here are some of the "militiamen."
Some civilian (probably export Imbel) FAL knockoff, doesn't even have a magazine.
Literally carrying shitty milsurp Mosins
Here's the BMOC himself inspecting a militiaman's AR-15
The point is that these militias are disorganized, grabastic groups of thugs that are being armed by the government with any firearms they have available. There is very little uniformity other than the prevalence of what are obviously repurposed civilian firearms and old ass military surplus that at one point were probably in a crate in the back of a civilian gun store. I am not saying that militaries don't keep old equipment in reserve, but they definitely don't keep these relics and civilian pattern firearms in armories. This is the equivalent of Uncle Sam handing out M1 Garands and Springfield M1903s.
