🇹🇭 Thailand reels from mall shooting as nursery massacre marks one-year anniversary
Now's the time to seize momentum for gun reform — will the new government do it?
Hello friends!
Here is a huge update from the Mekong region — blame Thailand, there’s a lot of news coming from there in the last week and all of it is important and/or intriguing. The Myanmar junta bombed a refugee camp to pieces on Monday. In Laos, a look at the special economic zones. A fascinating investigation from the Washington Post into Vietnam hacking phones in the US and an unusually quiet week in Cambodia.
It’s a lot, so let’s crack in.
Erin Cook.
🇹🇭 Fall out from last week’s shooting continues
The reckoning over last week’s shooting in Siam Paragon mall continues this week. It’s prompted debate on the ease of acquiring modified blank guns, that should only be able to fire blanks but are apparently readily available. At least, available enough for a 14-year-old to get his hands on one.
Police arrested three others on Thursday for allegedly selling the gun and the ammunition to the suspect, as per the Associated Press. A father and son from Yala were arrested last Wednesday and police allege a search on their property found ‘blank guns, hundreds of blank bullets and gun barrels.’ A third suspect, based in Bangkok, was found carrying a blank gun with another in his office.
If ‘Yala’ made your ears prick up, I’m curious too. The province is one deeply involved in the Muslim insurgency in the deep south. I don’t know much about what weapons exactly are used in those battles — seems to be a lot of dud bombs, to be honest — but I would love to read some analysis about the use of blank guns in the insurgency if that is indeed the case.
Tan Hui Yee of the Straits Times has an interesting analysis here. He takes a look at the pervasiveness of gun culture broadly in Thailand and how successive governments have repeatedly failed to introduce meaningful reform despite promises. There’s some truly jaw-dropping reporting and commenting in here, but this really got me: ‘Meanwhile, a government scheme that allows civil servants to buy tax-free guns is another major source of weapons circulating among civilians. These “welfare” guns, which can be bought for 30,000 baht to 40,000 baht instead of the usual 70,000 baht to 100,000 baht, cannot be resold for five years after purchase. But there is no limit to how many guns each civil servant can buy,’ Tan Hui Yee reports.
These guns were initially meant to protect civil servants doing risky work — same concept as the professions that are granted approval for carrying a gun in the Philippines, I think, just less broad — but eventually became almost a ‘status symbol.’ Very intriguing piece from Tan Hui Yee.
Thanaphon Settheesombat, a lawyer representing the family of Myanmar national Tawan who was one of two killed in the shooting, wants police to take a look at the suspect’s friends. The lawyer alleges there is evidence the suspects’ friends
played games together and chatted online in a manner that suggested that rather than feeling any regret, they admired the shooting,” as per the Bangkok Post.
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