The news is so unremittingly grim at the moment it’s difficult to know what to say. To keep on seeing the flower of the world’s youth just snuffed out in the time it takes to click a finger makes me just want to down the keyboard and just walk away, to never look at the news or or listen to the radio ever again. I’m reduced to posting silly kitten-with-a-gun pics just to lighten up a little.
Doesn’t work.
Weapons put us all in a world of grief, whether it’s in Iraq or in Peckham or in Darfur, or on a quiet university campus in the US, and the only people who truly profit from it are the arms dealers and their friends in government and the lobbying industry.
Currently, there are more than 600 million guns in circulation around the world. While there is no authoritative figure on illegal gun sales, researchers with Amnesty International and IANSA estimate that authorized small arms are worth at least $21 billion. They include pistols, revolvers, rifles, and light machine guns.
The study, entitled “The Impact of Guns on Women’s Lives,” identifies over 1,100 companies manufacturing small arms and ammunition in at least 98 countries, and says that these numbers are likely to grow.
The Amnesty research shows that G-8 countries–the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and Russia–account for more than 80 percent of global supplies of arms. Six of them are among the top 10 arms exporters in a trade valued at about $28 billion a year.
That whole ‘people kill people, not guns’ schtick, while trite, nevertheless has a kernel of truth to it: you need to interact with the gun to make it work. Without a human operator it is essentially useless metal. You could say the same about machetes, or thallium. What makes guns different is their efficiency – you could execute several thousand people with the right gun in the same time as it would take to chop a couple of huindred arms and legs off.
Instituting more gun controls will never stop people killing people. To think it might is utopian silliness. What it would do is to make that urge to kill so much less efficient in its practical application. As with racism or sexism or homophobia you can’t change someone’s mind if it’s made up; all you can do is to control behaviour. No-one (except maybe Malkin, Coulter and their ilk) actually wants anyone murdered, so what’s the problem with controlling murderous behaviour by taking away the tools that make that behaviour possible?
The problem is that it would cut profits,.and domestically the US gun manufacturers have been losing ground already.
The gun industry is small in relation to the effect that its products have on health and social conditions in the United States and the political power that it wields. The 1997 Census of Manufacturers, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, recorded 191 gun manufacturers in the United States, with total sales of just $1.2 billion and fewer than 10,000 employees. Cigarette manufacturers, by comparison, produced $28.3 billion worth of product that year; the alcoholic beverage industry produced $27.7 billion.3
A few gun manufacturers dominate the market. In 1999, for example, the top 10 producers of semiautomatic pistols accounted for 77% of all domestic manufacture; 5 revolver manufacturers accounted for 98% of all revolver production.4 In the early 1990s, some 80% of inexpensive, easily concealable “Saturday night special” handguns were produced by 5 manufacturers surrounding Los Angeles, dubbed the “Ring of Fire.”5 Figure 1 lists the leading manufacturers of semiautomatic pistols during the 1990s. Four of them were part of the Ring of Fire.
Recently, domestic gun manufacturers have struggled as gun sales in the United States have fallen. As Figure 2 shows, domestic rifle and shotgun manufacture declined until the mid-1980s and has remained relatively stable since then. Handgun manufacture rose rapidly to peaks in 1982 and again in 1993, but declined precipitously after both peaks.
Those figures are from 1997: I’ve had some difficulty in finding more recent figures, as it seems as though the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the federal body that regulates and oversees the domestic arms trade, is like other areas of the Bush administration, totally screwed by corruption and incompetence.
How incompetent are they? Very, by their own admisssion, as this internal review of procedures makes clear [an FFL is a federal firearms license]:
The ATF Does Not Conduct In-Person Application Inspections on All New FFLs
ATF’s Field Divisions Implement FFL Inspections Inconsistently
Suspected Criminal Violations Are Not Always Referred for Investigation
ATF Acts Infrequently to Revoke Federal Firearms Licenses and the Process is Not Timely
New ATF Guidelines Begins to Address Inconsistent and Untimely Adverse Actions
That’s what sours me on any new moves towards gun control whether domestically or internationally – what would be the point of instituting new gun ownership laws when the ones there are aren’t applied, or are applied inconsistently? Even were the agency competent, when you have Bush putting in corrupt crionies at the top there’s little hope for change.
Besides, there’s way too much money involved; too many people do well out of gun sales and wider world defence tech sales and with the domestic market almost saturated ( the commonly quoted figure is 1 gun per US citizen) these overseas sales are increasingly important to maintain profitability. Wikepedia:
The United States is by far the largest exporter of weapons in the world, with a sales volume that exceeds the next 14 countries combined. Military sales equate to about 18 percent of the Federal budget, far and away the greatest proportion of any nation. (Estimated budget authority as presented in the President’s budget.) John Ralston Saul states that the American government cannot reduce arms sales because of the consequent fall in GDP. (See John Ralston Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism, 2005)
U.S. arms are sold either as Foreign military sales (FMS), in which The Pentagon is an intermediate negotiator, or as Direct Commercial Sales (DCS), where a company directly negotiates with its buyer. Many sales require a license from the State Department. The Defense Department manages the Excess Defense Articles (EDA), weapons from the US military given away or sold at bargain prices, emergency drawdowns, assistance provided at the discretion of the President, and International Military Education and Training (IMET).
From 1989 to 1996, the global value of direct commercial arms sales was US$257 billion, of which 45% was exported from the US. According to the 2005 annual US congress reports, 58% of all US arms trade contracts are made with developing countries. The most recent World Policy Report, an annual update issued by the Arms Trade Research Center, a more detailed breakdown of US military spending is offered. It is here touched on from the following passages from the executive summary, expounded upon later in the report.
“In 2003, the last year for which full information is available, the United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts. From Angola, Chad and Ethiopia, to Colombia, Pakistan and the Philippines, transfers through the two largest U.S. arms sales programs (Foreign Military Sales and Commercial Sales) to these conflict nations totaled nearly $1 billion in 2003, with the vast bulk of the dollar volume going to Israel ($845.6 million).
In 2003, more than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13 of 25) were defined as undemocratic by the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report: in the sense that “citizens do not have the right to change their own government” or that right was seriously abridged. These 13 nations received over $2.7 billion in U.S. arms transfers under the Foreign Military Sales and Commercial Sales programs in 2003, with the top recipients including Saudi Arabia ($1.1 billion), Egypt ($1.0 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), the United Arab Emirates ($110 million) and Uzbekistan ($33 million).”
Who owns the arms companies? We do. American, British, Israeli, French, Belgian, Chinese, Russian – wherever you are, your country sells arms.
Guns are not going away, their manufacturers and dealers’ll make sure of that. They are too inextricably linked to government through sub-contracting and lobbying, The revolving door between defence personnel and arms industry jobs is revolving so fast it’s hard to tell who’s who – public servant or gun sales rep? And when you bring the wider issue of defence tech sales in, the picture gets murkier still. Arms money corrupts.
Senior MoD jailed for taking bribes from US arms dealer
Last updated at 17:16pm on 16th April 2007A senior Ministry of Defence official who built a luxury villa in the sun with bribes for helping an American company win a lucrative contract has been jailed for two years.
Greedy Michael Hale’s lengthy betrayal of trust saw the American company being fed so much confidential information that it was able to run circles around the competition.
In addition to backhanders of more than £217,000, the 58-year-old civil servant’s five-star lifestyle featured free flights, champagne hospitality aboard an ocean-going cruiser and stays in top hotels, London’s Southwark Crown Court heard.
But when his secret paymaster was taken over by another firm, “due diligence” attorneys in California uncovered a total of nine corrupt payments paid to him over the years.
The US authorities promptly informed the MoD.
During the ensuing investigation both his wife and stepson were arrested and wrongly accused of money-laundering. They were subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing.
Hale, of Crown Mews, Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, pleaded guilty to nine counts of accepting bribes from Pacific Consolidated Industries between November 1999 and July 2003.
We’re a planet full of corrupt governments all busy selling each other weapons with which we then turn around and kill each other’s citizens, which promotes more conflict, which promotes more arms sales, which promotes more conflict….
The world is awash in weapons like never before : but even if every registered and unregistered handgun in the US and UK were confiscated tomorrow, they’d be pouring in through the container ports again within a day or so. It’s no use asking the government to fix it: they’re part of the problem.
Guns have always been a topic I’ve had mixed feelihgs about. I used to belong a small bore rifle club and I admit that once I was given the chance to fire a police machihe gun and it gave me a hell of a thrill. I’d be lying if I said that in the current authoritarian climate I wouldn’t want a gun in the house were I concerned that I might become the target of rightwing eliminationists. Sometimes individuals, like nations, do need weapons for self-defence. But does that justify the current scale of the domestic and international arms trades or their embedding in government?
I have no idea what the answer is. It’s totally impractical to ban guns, what with the sheer quantity of them scattered about the planet, but if we don’t we’ll turn into a collection of individual, barricaded, armed enclaves where anyone suspicious is shot on sight as a potential perp. We have to do something. I just don’t know what it is, and i’m not sure anyone else does either. This is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle.
