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More Than Half World's Small Arms are Owned by Civilians, not Governments
More than half of the world's 551 million firearms are legally owned by private civilians rather than governments, with fewer than a million in the hands of insurgents, according to a new study on the global arms trade released Tuesday.
But those 910,000 weapons illegally in the hands of rebels -- a minuscule 0.2 percent of the total -- are responsible for much of the carnage inflicted by gunfire, some 1,500 deaths a day worldwide, the authors said.
"The weapons problem is complex, multi-faceted and long term�� it is not going to disappear tomorrow,'' said Peter Batchelor, project director for the three-year survey by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.
Batchelor, a South African, and Canadian co-author Keith Krause presented the findings on the second day of a two-week U.N. conference aimed at finding ways to curtail illicit small arms and light weapons trafficking.
Among the key findings spelled out by Batchelor and Krause at a news conference:
Illicit traffic in small arms is worth dlrs 1 billion a year, a figure also accepted by the United Nations. It constitutes 10 percent to 20 percent of the overall trade in such weaponry.
Government military forces, scaled back in the past decade, account for some 226 million weapons, or 41 percent, while police forces hold 18 million, or 3 percent.
Gun makers have grown from about 200 in 1980 to 600 today in 95 countries, but the actual manufacture of weapons has declined from 6.3 million to 4.3 million a year, due to shrinking demand and the vast numbers of guns already in existence.
The United States has more than half of the world's gun makers and leads all nations in the manufacture and export of small arms and ammunition. Yet the industry, with 16,700 workers, contributes only dlrs 2 billion a year to the U.S. economy, compared to dlrs 28 billion from tobacco, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
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