MISSING PIECES - Inter-Parliamentary Union

MISSING PIECES
TABLE 3 POSSIBLE RESPONSES TO THE KEY FACTORS INFLUENCING GUN
ACQUISITION AND USE
Motivations
Deep preference
Personal security
Social and economic
stability
Particularly in waraffected
nations
Individual status,
identity, and belonging
Violent conflict,
political identity, and
group status
Possible responses
• Institute or strengthen community policing
• Reform justice (courts, penal) and security (police,
military) sectors
• Take guns out of circulation
• Improve street lighting and public infrastructures
(such as paved roads)
• Promote gun-free zones in schools, workplaces,
churches, market/shopping places, and sporting
facilities
• Provide education and employment opportunities,
particularly for youth
• Stigmatise corruption
• Support reintegration of ex-combatants and excriminals
• Reform war economies; crack down on trafficking in
conflict goods (timber, diamonds, etc.)
• Challenge images of violent masculinity and offer
alternatives
• Look at the role of art, sport, media, and entertainment
in normalising and condoning gun possession
and misuse
• Encourage social customs dissociating guns from
power, pride, and manhood
• Increase capacity for non-violent conflict resolution
• Improve public participation in government
• Acknowledge and act to redress inequalities and
injustice that influence recourse to violence and
human rights abuses
Means
Price
Monetary value of
guns (relative to other
goods, particularly
substitutes)
Increasing the cost(s)
of illegal possession
and misuse
Possible responses
• Restrict supply, leading to an increase in the prices
of small arms
• Strengthen national gun laws to ensure small arms
ownership is subject to criteria (e.g. age, proof of
need, safe storage), all owners require a renewable
licence, and all guns are registered
• Improve response and efficiency rates of police to
requests for assistance from citizens
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