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'Natural to own gun for protection': Gun culture in Thailand deep-rooted
The Straits Times
|October 23, 2023
Recent mass shootings cast spotlight on prevalence of firearms, both legal and illegal
BANGKOK Retired government officer Phairoj Kullavanijaya spends most of his days working on his fruit farm in Chachoengsao in south-central Thailand - an area most consider to be generally safe.
But the 68-year-old feels more at ease with his 9mm pistol at his side.
"I've always been interested in guns. It's natural that a man would want to own a gun for protection," said Mr Phairoj, who used to work in the Ministry of Commerce.
He bought the firearm after retiring in 2010 through a scheme that allows government employees to buy guns at a discounted rate, although he said he has never fired his weapon outside a shooting range.
His love for guns has not changed, despite a string of mass shooting incidents in recent years.
The latest is the Siam Paragon shooting in Bangkok's bustling shopping belt earlier in October that killed three people and left several others injured.
It shocked both locals and tourists, and not just because the shooter was a 14-year-old who used an illegal gun.
It also cast a spotlight on the prevalence of guns, both legal and illegal, in what many consider a relatively peaceful country, and the deep-rooted and somewhat uneasy familiarity that Thais have with firearms.
"Most Thai people do not fear guns," said Mahidol University criminology researcher Anchistha Suriyavorapunt, adding that gun culture is particularly ingrained among those in the rural provincial areas.
"They don't have confidence in crime control policy to protect them, their possessions or their land, so they prefer to carry a gun for assurance."
October's shooting is Thailand's third major mass shooting incident in three years.
In October 2022, a former police officer shot and stabbed 36 people, most of them pre-school children, in the north-eastern province of Nong Bua Lamphu. And in 2020, a former army officer killed 29 in a mass shooting attack in a shopping mall in Nakhon Ratchasima.
This story is from the October 23, 2023 edition of The Straits Times.
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