Small Arms and Light Weapons - Harry Frank Guggenheim ...

Weapons of Mass DestructionJoel WallmanVery few of today's armed conflicts take placebetween armed forces of different states. Rather,most such violence occurs within states. The strategyof armed groups in these conflicts involvesdeliberate targeting of civilians, and most of thesecasualties, as well as those of the combatants, areinflicted with small arms and light weapons—instruments wielded by one or two people, such aspistols, rifles, and mortars. The small-arms problemhas not received anything like the academicattention devoted to the problem of nuclear proliferation,perhaps because, given the ubiquity andquotidian nature of these weapons, they do notengender the anxiety of atomic devices. Thus far,however, the human toll of small arms and lightweapons far exceeds that from nuclear, chemical,or biological weapons. The Small Arms Survey, aresearch organization that issues annual reportsbased on meticulous research, estimates that300,000 people are killed each year with theseweapons, around one-third in group conflicts andthe others from homicide or suicide by firearm.And, of course, a much larger number of victims ofsmall arms survive their injuries but live on withgrievous damage. In their aggregate effects, theseare proven weapons of mass destruction.Small arms and light weapons can potentiate aspiral of lawlessness. Weak states allow their proliferation,and acquisition of arms allows formerlypowerless groups to challenge authority, furtherweakening it. The abundance of arms in the handsof nonstate actors means that new wars can readilybe started. In the case of pre-existing conflicts, theinflux of weapons exacerbates the violence, asfirearms are intrinsically more deadly than othersmall weapons. It is true that much of the 1994killing in Rwanda was conducted with machetes,but the scale of the carnage in such a short timecould not have been achieved without the massiveavailability of rifles, grenades, and similar weaponsused to round up and terrorize the victims.The problem is by no means just one of insurgentgroups besieging legitimate governments,however. Among the worst abusers of small armsare repressive governments and their paramilitaryadjuncts, such as the janjaweed militia of Sudan,who, in concert with government forces, have beencommitting atrocities of genocidal proportion inDarfur.There are other effects of the spread of theseweapons, none of them good. In today's substateconflicts, anyone can become a combatant byacquiring a weapon, and participants in these warstend to be less constrained in whom they targetthan traditional soldiers. As a result, humanitarianagencies, which strive to reduce the impact of waron civilians, have become increasingly reluctant tosend their people into conflict areas. The acquisitionof weapons by young men, especially boys,inverts traditional authority relations, placingpower in the hands of people who, not havingknown it before, are perhaps more reluctant to disarmthan would be their elders. And, more generally,the likelihood of adherence to a peace agreementis much lower when large numbers of militantsremain armed.Many organizations have taken up the cause ofstemming the illicit flow of small arms, but, torepeat, only a modest effort has been devoted thusfar to systematic research on the nature of thisproblem: the diversion of arms from the legitimateto illicit market, the role of small arms in the out-1