As of September 9, Colombians who already held a valid firearm-carry permit no longer need to request a special annual authorization to use it. President Abelardo de la Espriella defended the change by pointing to seizure statistics that, his government argues, prove the real threat comes from illegal weapons. The figure driving that argument — that 76% of Colombia's gun homicides are committed with illegally sourced firearms — has circulated widely in the debate over the decree. The trouble is that the 76% doesn't answer that question at all.
Key Takeaways
- President Abelardo de la Espriella signed Decree 1368 of 2026 on September 8, lifting an 11-year-old general suspension on firearm-carry permits; it took effect the next day.
- The government backed the move with seizure figures: 15,700 firearms confiscated between January 1 and September 3, of which 14,179 were tied to crimes.
- The widely cited 76% measures the share of Colombian homicides committed with a firearm versus other methods — not the share of those firearms that were illegal, a figure no Colombian institution has ever produced.
A Restored Permit, Not an Open Carry Law
The decree does not create a new right to carry a weapon, nor does it let any citizen walk into the street armed. It restores legal effect to carry permits that were already valid, freeing holders from the extra yearly authorization that had been required since 2015. The state still holds a monopoly on who may carry: applicants must be at least 25, show no criminal record, and pass medical and psychological fitness checks, and a permit that had already expired, been suspended, canceled or blocked by a court order does not come back to life.
What the decree actually repeals stretches back further than the current controversy suggests. The general suspension began in December 2015 under President Juan Manuel Santos and was renewed by every administration since: first Iván Duque, through Decree 2362 of 2018, then Gustavo Petro, through a decree signed December 31, 2025. De la Espriella's new decree strikes down both of those predecessors, not just the most recent one — effectively closing out nearly eleven uninterrupted years of restriction.
The Official Case: 15,700 Weapons in Eight Months
To justify the change, De la Espriella posted a security-forces tally on X: between January 1 and September 3, authorities seized 15,700 firearms, of which 14,179 were linked to crimes. Of the weapons tied to armed groups, the president said 980 traced back to FARC dissident factions — including 380 rifles and 65 sixty-millimeter mortars — 551 to the Clan del Golfo, and 339 to the National Liberation Army (ELN). Government spokesperson Miller Soto added that the National Police alone carried out nearly 83% of those seizures. De la Espriella framed the move as a campaign promise kept, putting his reasoning bluntly: "criminals have no right to be armed to the teeth."
The Number That Doesn't Say What It Seems To
This is where the government's argument runs into a data problem that predates De la Espriella by years. The 76% figure — and its statistical siblings, 72% in 2019, 77.9% for the first half of 2024 according to the Centro de Estudios de Justicia, 81% at the start of 2026 per a Universidad del Rosario study — measures something entirely different from what the public debate assumes. It describes the share of all Colombian homicides committed with a firearm as the method, as opposed to a knife, a blunt object or another means. It says nothing about whether that firearm was licensed.
A policy paper written by Colombia's own Attorney General's Office makes this explicit. Presenting the 76% figure for 2010–2015 — the same number circulating today — the document states in the very next section that there is no precise information on how many illegal firearms circulate in the country, and calls for a weapons-traceability system precisely because that data does not exist. Colombia's forensics agency logs the mechanism of death, not the legal status of the weapon.
Fact-checker ColombiaCheck reached the same conclusion twice while examining similar claims from other politicians, finding that between 69% and 77% of Colombian homicides involve a firearm, but that no agency can say how many of those weapons were legal or illegal. Katherine Aguirre, a researcher at Brazil's Instituto Igarapé, told the outlet that forensic authorities only record the mechanism used in a killing, not whether the weapon had a valid carry permit. Put simply, the statistic fueling the decree debate answers "what killed them," not "was the gun legal."
The confusion doesn't stop at 76%. At the decree signing itself, De la Espriella went further, claiming that 99.9% of crimes committed with weapons in Colombia involve unlicensed firearms — a figure that, according to a wire report picked up by Yahoo Noticias, he presented without citing an official source. It isn't the first time he has used that number: he cited it in February, before taking office, to explain why he himself has carried a weapon since age 20. No public institution has ever matched that figure, and the underlying pattern — a firearm-homicide statistic recast as an illegal-weapons statistic — is nearly identical to claims ColombiaCheck has debunked from other Colombian politicians in the past.
From U.S. Gun Shops to Border Smuggling Routes
What is better documented is how illegal weapons actually enter Colombia. Much of the flow traces back to legal purchases in the United States that are later diverted south; Washington's 2026 national drug strategy acknowledged this year that arms trafficking into Mexico, and onward through the region, strengthens cartels and their armed allies. Along the Venezuelan border, particularly around Cúcuta, social organizations have documented weapons and ammunition decommissioned from Venezuelan military units reaching local gangs and groups like the Clan del Golfo. To the south, Ecuador's Observatory of Organized Crime has traced weapons entering that country from Colombia, Mexico and Peru, moved along jungle paths, rivers and small aircraft that often carry drugs and guns together.
At the opposite end of the map, the Darién jungle bordering Panama hosts another armed standoff: alliances between FARC dissidents and the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces, and between the ELN, the Caparrapos gang and Mexican cartels, compete for a corridor that moves migrants, drugs and weapons simultaneously.
Opposition Voices, From Ávila to Petro
Green Alliance Senator Ariel Ávila called the decision a "grave error," warning that legally circulating weapons can be diverted into organized crime through theft or institutional losses. He pointed to Ecuador under President Guillermo Lasso, where — in his reading — a similar loosening of carry rules ended up arming gangs like Los Choneros and Los Lobos, though analysts still debate how much of Ecuador's later surge in violence that policy actually caused.
Pacto Histórico Senator Esmeralda Hernández announced she will sue to block the decree, calling it "an extremely dangerous measure," while former president Gustavo Petro summed up his objection in two words on X: "necropolitics." Other opposition lawmakers, including Mauricio Toro and Kevin Gómez, echoed the criticism, while government-aligned figures such as former senator María Fernanda Cabal welcomed the decree as restoring rights to law-abiding citizens.
A Debate That's Still Unresolved
Decree 1368 took effect September 9 and has since been published in Colombia's official gazette. The government frames it as a win for citizens who follow the law, but the underlying dispute doesn't turn on the number driving today's headlines: Colombia genuinely concentrates most of its homicides in firearms, but the claim that most of those firearms are illegal — the one propping up both the public debate and the government's own case for the decree — remains, for now, a figure nobody has actually measured.
