Authorities will close legal loopholes relating to firearm classification and online sales as part of a stepped-up gun control effort, national police chief Torsak Sukvimol said on Wednesday, a day after a deadly shooting at a Bangkok shopping mall left two people dead.
The gun used by the 14-year-old shooter at Siam Paragon was modified and originally designed to fire blank rounds, meaning it wasn’t classified as a lethal weapon, and it was likely purchased online, Pol Gen Torsak said.
The boy, who is facing murder and other charges, has been remanded to a juvenile detention centre where he will undergo a psychiatric assessment.
There are more than 10,000 such legally imported guns in circulation in Thailand, and police will work with other government agencies to reclassify them as deadly firearms to block their import, Pol Gen Torsak said
“We want to make sure these guns are a controlled firearm because their modification makes them a deadly weapon,” he said in an interview with television Channel 3.
Kritsanapong Phutrakul, a former policeman who is now a criminologist at Rangsit University, said modifying a blank gun is illegal but perpetrators could easily learn how to make modifications and there were criminal services offering this.
The gun used at Paragon was reportedly modified with help from a video on YouTube.
A Reuters search of Lazada and Shopee, the top e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia, on Wednesday showed several types of blank guns for sale at prices starting around 5,000 baht.
Shopee and Lazada did not immediately respond to questions from Reuters.
‘Lessons from past shootings’
Authorities can improve gun control by improving enforcement, including creating a faster mechanism to block websites and online services that offer to sell or modify firearms, said Mr Kritsanapong.
The political will to push for long-term gun control is also essential, he added.
Pol Gen Torsak said the force would form a team to tackle the illegal sale of firearms on the internet.
Existing laws on the possession of illegal firearms carry a prison sentence of up to 10 years and a fine of up to 20,000 baht.
Laws have tightened after mass shootings in recent years in Thailand, including a requirement for a medical evaluation for those who want to buy a gun or renew their gun licence.
Last October, a former policeman killed 35 people, including 22 children (most of whom were stabbed), at a nursery in Nong Bua Lam Phu in northeastern Thailand. And in 2020, a soldier shot and killed at least 29 people in Nakhon Ratchasima.
In the Nong Bua Lam Phu attacks, the Sig Sauer P365 used by the killer was one of a growing number of semiautomatic handguns and rifles exported by American gunmakers and linked to violent crimes, a Bloomberg investigation has revealed.
Following the October shooting, the previous government drafted a gun amnesty bill allowing those with unregistered weapons to register them or hand them over during a grace period. The bill, however, did not make it through parliament ahead of the May general election.
“The government should learn the lessons from past mass shooting incidents, review the proposed solutions and quickly implement them,” Mr Kritsanapong said.
Many firearms are smuggled into the country, but Mr Kritsanapong said internet sales were becoming a problem.
“Only a small number of police officers have the knowledge, capabilities and experience to track the gun market online,” he told AFP.
Following Tuesday’s tragedy, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin ordered the police to strictly enforce laws related to online weapons purchase.
Pol Gen Torsak insisted police had been taking suppression of gun-related crime very seriously.
In the past two years, he said, police had charged offenders in more than 2,000 cases and seized more than 900 guns.
However, blank guns tend to be popular with students, data collected by the Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec) suggests.
Pol Gen Torsak is coordinating with the Department of Provincial Administration, which oversees gun registration, to regulate the imports of blank guns by considering them as real guns.
Pol Maj Gen Amnat Traipot, deputy chief of the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau (CCIB), told reporters that it had seized more than 2,000 blank guns with thousands of bullet rounds in a crackdown on online scammers last year.
The Office of Police Forensic Science also confirms a blank gun can be modified to fire a bullet with a power closer to that of a real gun. It examines more than 100 modified blank guns a month on average, said Pol Maj Gen Amnat.
Meanwhile, Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said he would ask the Department of Provincial Administration to stop issuing gun licences to the general public to reduce gun possession. He also suggested regulating the trade of BB guns and blank guns with legal registration requirements to acquire them.
Thailand 13th in gun ownership worldwide
Around 10.3 million guns — only 6.2 million of them registered — were possessed by Thais, putting the country in 13th place globally for small gun possession, according to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey in 2017.
The authors of the survey estimated that Thai people possessed the most guns in Southeast Asia, with an average of 15 firearms per 100 population.
The United States topped the table with 393.3 million guns, followed by India (71.1 million) and China (49.7 million).
Data from the World Population Review in 2022 indicated Thailand was ranked 15th globally in gun deaths with 2,804 people killed, for a rate of 3.91 people per 100,000 population.
The Philippines was the top country in Asean region with 9,267 gun deaths.