Small arms: no single solution; every minute someone is killed by a gun.

• Author: Peters, Rebecca
• Position: Report

A thousand people die each day from gunshot wounds, and three times as many are left with severe injuries. If the death, injury and disability resulting from small arms were categorized as a disease, it would qualify as an epidemic. Yet the media and popular perception tend to suggest that gun violence is simply an unavoidable consequence of human cruelty or deprivation, rather than a public health problem which can be prevented or at least reduced.

The circumstances of gun violence vary so enormously, it would be simplistic to suggest a single solution. A comprehensive approach, reflecting the multi-faceted nature of the problem, is needed to bring down the grim toll of global death and injury. Nonetheless, the high school massacres in the US, the armed gangs in Brazil or the systematic sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo all share a common denominator: the availability of guns (or small arms, as they are known in UN circles).

Practical steps toward reducing the availability and misuse of small arms can be classed under four headings:

1. Reducing the existing stockpile

2. Reducing the supply of new weapons

3. Closing the gates between the legal and illegal markets

4. Reducing the motivation for acquiring guns (demand)

   1 REDUCING THE EXISTING STOCKPILE

   The existing global small arms stockpile is huge--at least 875 million guns, according to the Small Arms Survey in Geneva. Less than 25 per cent of these are in the possession of armies, police or other government agencies; the remaining three-quarters are in the hands of civilians. Guns on earth outnumber cars by about 40 per cent. How can we reduce this enormous pool of weapons?

   Reducing the existing State stockpile. The best place to start is with government arsenals, which by nature are easier to identify and affect than the diffuse civilian holdings. With large amounts of weaponry concentrated in a few locations, a focus on the State stockpile is the quickest way to make a dent in the sheer number of guns on the planet. Governments may consider large armouries to be necessary for national defence, but they overestimate their need: according to the Small Arms Survey, 38 percent of military small arms in government arsenals are surplus to requirements. This represents not only a large waste of resources (in buying the guns, recording them, storing, maintaining and guarding them), but also a serious hazard to military and civilian populations living near accumulations of surplus weapons. In addition to the physical danger of explosions, surplus stocks act as a magnet for traffickers, insurgents and criminals, often with tragic results.

   The grave threat posed by surplus guns and ammunition has been formally recognized by the UN small arms process. A UN Group of Governmental Experts on surplus ammunition was established by the General Assembly in late 2007, and disposal of surplus weapons was one of the priority topics at the Third Biennial Meeting of States on Small Arms and Light Weapons in 2008. The consistent advice is that governments should systematically identify and destroy their surplus stock.

   Reducing the existing civilian stockpile. Disarming civilian populations is more difficult than disarming governments. Nevertheless it is arguably more necessary, given that civilians constitute the overwhelming majority not only of gun owners, but also of the victims and perpetrators of gun violence.

   Many countries have implemented voluntary programs encouraging citizens to surrender weapons in exchange for cash, household goods or other benefits to individuals. In "Weapons for Development" schemes, the reward for handing in guns is development assistance to improve educational, economic and security conditions for the entire community. The success of voluntary collection has varied around the world: ad hoc local initiatives in US cities have mostly recovered small numbers of guns. Larger quantities tend to be recovered where the collection is part of a coherent national policy and where people perceive that local security is improving.

   Obligatory weapons collection programmes also have mixed results. Australia and Brazil removed huge numbers of guns from circulation (650,000 and 450,000 respectively) with programmes based on a dual incentive: (a) cash compensation and (b) legislative changes making it harder to qualify to own guns legally. The latter meant that many owners faced the possibility of being in illegal possession of their previously legal weapons if they kept them after the buyback. Importantly, both of these buybacks were part of comprehensive national initiatives including massive public awareness programs, reforms to police procedures, etc. On the other hand, a forcible disarmament program in Uganda, where soldiers searched houses and assaulted civilians forcing them to surrender their arms, recovered relatively few guns and exacerbated the feeling of insecurity among the population.

   Destruction of existing weapons. Whether from state arsenals, defeated enemies, arrested criminals or civilian owners, small arms that are in surplus, obsolete, seized, surrendered or otherwise removed from circulation should be destroyed. Though this may seem an obvious point, it appears to have eluded many governments. They downsize their arsenal to save costs or to comply with...