MISSING PIECES - Inter-Parliamentary Union

CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION: PARLIAMENTARIANS MAKING A
DIFFERENCE
Missing Pieces provides parliamentarians, advisors, and civil
society with recommendations for action to control the
arms trade and reduce gun violence. Global efforts in
recent years have generated attention to these concerns,
yet it is at the national and regional levels where the most tangible action
can and must occur. Parliamentarians can be instrumental in setting
policy and creating initiatives at various levels, setting as the key goal an
end to the human cost of armed violence.
The policy recommendations spread through the various themes can
be summarised in five overarching priorities:
1. Regulating the use of small arms
2. Draining the existing pool of guns and ammunition
3. Regulating the transfer of small arms
4. Reducing the demand for guns
5. Assisting survivors of armed violence
Together these ‘pieces’ offer options and analysis for improving human
security in a wide range of contexts—in war zones as well in countries suffering
from widespread gun crime—and whether the threats come from
civilians, disenfranchised young men, armed forces, rogue groups, or repressive
security actors. As this publication emphasises, ‘affected states’
are not limited to southern, war-torn societies: the human cost of gun
violence is high in so-called ‘peaceful’ or developed nations, where crime,
homicides, intimate partner violence and suicides are facilitated by the
easy availability of guns. As a first step, all governments, and particularly
parliamentarians, need to set their own houses in order with transparent,
accountable and effective national policies.
Parliamentarians have a crucial role to play in this regard, as a channel
of communication between the state and its citizens, as principal law-
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