Brazil has very strict gun control laws. It also has a whole lot of murders.

Brazil is already the world’s most murderous country. A record 63,800 were murdered in 2017. Of those fatalities, some 43,000 were caused by firearms. That is almost three times as many gun-related homicides as there were the same year in the United States.

Brazil currently has strict gun control laws. You have to be over 25 years of age, have no criminal record, demonstrate an “effective need” for a firearm, pass tests on psychological aptitude and gun handling, and pay a hefty fee for a license that must be renewed every five years. Partly as a result of this thicket of controls, Brazil has among Latin America’s lowest rates of civilian firearm possession (registered and unregistered), according to the 2017 Small Arms Survey, ranking well below the world’s top 25.

Now there’s been a school shooting. Despite media claims, school shootings don’t just happen in America. They happen around the world. And gun laws don’t prevent them.

Two former students opened fire at a Brazilian school on Wednesday and killed at least five teenagers as well as two school officials before committing suicide in an attack that police said was inspired by the 1999 Columbine massacre in the United States.

That is to say, inspired by the non-stop media coverage of the attack, meant to spur gun control laws, that instead caused school shootings.

Before entering the Raul Brasil school in Suzano near Sao Paulo, the former pupils aged 17 and 25 shot and killed the younger assailant’s uncle, who owned a car rental agency where they stole a vehicle.

Ten people, including the two attackers, were killed in total, Sao Paulo police said. The students who died were boys mostly 15 and 16 years old.

The media will predictably spin this to attack President Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to allow normal people to legally obtain guns for self-defense, but the statistics make it very clear that Brazil has a very high murder rate and the only thing gun control laws did was keep non-criminals from having guns.