MISSING PIECES - Inter-Parliamentary Union

THEME 1
THEME 1 PREVENTING MISUSE:
NATIONAL REGULATION OF SMALL ARMS
Worldwide, the majority of small arms and light weapons
are held not by military personnel or law enforcement
officers, but by private citizens. 1 As these guns are routinely
misused, stolen or otherwise leaked into the illicit trade,
it is imperative that gun ownership and access by civilians be adequately
regulated and limited at the national level.
In the last decade, several countries—including Australia, Brazil, Belgium,
Cambodia, Canada, Germany, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, South Africa,
Turkey and the United Kingdom—have undertaken significant reforms to
regulate and limit gun ownership by civilians. Many other governments—
including those of Afghanistan, Argentina, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso,
Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Ireland, Jamaica, Jordan, Lebanon,
Liberia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Nicaragua, the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, Panama, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Portugal, Rwanda,
Senegal, Sweden, Thailand, Uganda, Uruguay and Yemen—are currently
in the process of strengthening laws and policies.
Such reform is propelled mainly by local realities: massacres with guns
that provoked widespread public outrage in Australia, Canada, and the
UK; alarming levels of random and/or organised armed violence in Brazil
and Thailand; and post-war or democratic transitional processes in Cambodia,
Sierra Leone, and South Africa. These efforts have also been informed
and reinforced by work at the international and regional levels, which
increasingly has implied or explicitly called for more careful regulation of
civilian ownership of and access to small arms and light weapons.
Several factors account for this. Firstly, many governments recognise
a connection between armed violence and the uncontrolled, or loosely
controlled, trade in and possession of guns. 2 There is also growing awareness
that most of the problems posed by weapons availability and misuse
are ‘civilian’—that is, most guns are owned by civilians, and most victims
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