Thailand’s Spiraling Gun Violence and the Need for Solutions

Last week, police arrested a fourteen-year-old boy who went on a mass shooting rampage at Siam Paragon, one of the biggest and most popular (with Thais and tourists alike) malls in Bangkok, which is saying something since downtown Bangkok is packed with luxury malls. The boy killed two people and injured multiple others. The mall is always bustling, and the shooting occurred in the late afternoon when it was probably especially crowded. The suspect reportedly suffered from mental health issues.

The mass shooting at Siam Paragon received significant media attention because it was at a major tourist site in the heart of the Thai capital. Still, Thailand has suffered from a string of gun massacres, partly because of the many challenges of its archaic and often ineffective gun laws. Last October, thirty-six people, including many children, were killed in a mass shooting and knifing at a daycare center in northeast Thailand. The massacre was committed by a former police officer, who ended the violence by killing his wife and stepson before taking his own life. That followed a mass shooting at a military base where a soldier killed twenty-nine people, including the commanding officer of his battalion, and held multiple people hostage before he was killed in a raid on his position.

There are multiple reasons why Thailand suffers from more mass shootings and gun violence than most other Southeast states, excluding Myanmar, which is at war. For one, as I noted in a prior Asia Unbound blog, it is very easy for members of the Thai military and police to access weapons, even when they are not on duty or when they have left the army or police force. As I noted in that blog:

“Former members of the police and military have ready access to guns, even when there are questions about their mental health. They can buy guns through the government, essentially from government gun sellers, and amass large stocks. This is, of course, designed to keep weapons in the hands of the police and military in what has primarily been an authoritarian state for the past seven decades.” 

The spread of social media also seems to motivate mass shooters in Thailand, as in other places. The attacker at the military base posted a video of his attack on Facebook Live, apparently trying to copy the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand shooter.

Even for people not in the army or police, gun laws are very lax and antiquated in Thailand, and as a result, the kingdom has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in Asia. Indeed, I was mistaken and miswrote in a prior blog when I said that Thailand had harsh gun laws—I meant instead that they were even more lax for the military and police than the general public. They are not harsh for the general public either. Indeed, guns bought without a permit circulate widely and easily in Thailand, which has robust black markets in many illegal items (weapons, narcotics, the wild animal trade, etc.) with little effort by law enforcement to track them, as it is next door to a country enmeshed in a civil war and full of soldiers and arms traffickers moving across the Thailand-Myanmar border.

As Paul Quaglia, the Bangkok-based chief executive officer of PQA Associates, a risk assessment firm, told the New York Times, “There isn’t any systemic effort here to register guns … The problem in Thailand is that the country is awash in guns. They’re freely available and easily obtained, both licitly and illicitly.”

Even when Thais buy guns legally and register them—and there is a background check—there are few laws surrounding ownership. Once you get a permit for a gun, it lasts forever, and does not have to be renewed. This is a very unusual approach to gun ownership compared to most other countries in Asia and probably adds to the number of weapons in circulation in the kingdom. And, of course, mass shooting is just one type of gun violence—Thailand also suffers from high murder and suicide rates.

Will the new Pheu Thai-led government take real measures to address Thailand’s gun violence? To do so, it would have to take on the army and police, which will block any efforts to restrict their soldiers and police officer’s ability to obtain guns, even when not on duty or no longer on the force. Siam Paragon hit home right in Bangkok, so perhaps Pheu Thai will act, but it has significant hurdles to overcome.