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Small arms include hand guns, pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns, mortars, grenades, light missiles. Light weapons include heavy machine guns, mounted grenade launchers, portable anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns, and portable launchers of anti-tank missile. The illicit proliferation of SALW poses a grave danger to international security and stability, and threatens the lives of millions around the world every year. Key issues in the combat against SALW include marking, tracing, collecting, and destroying small arms; child soldiers; women and gun violence; trade controls and arms brokers; development and public health.
The most comprehensive source of information on SALW is the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), a global network of over 700 civil society organizations working to stop the proliferation and misuse of SALW around the world.
Causes:
Small arms and light weapons fuel civil wars and other conflicts, causing harm to millions of people, particularly in Africa. These small weapons are only part of a larger trade that includes heavier and more lethal weaponry, but light arms are often especially baneful because they are cheap, easy to transport and can be handled by ill-trained rebel soldiers and even children. Recent UN reports show how these weapons are illicitly exported, transported with the connivance of government officials in many countries and smuggled into war zones. In some areas, automatic weapons are so cheap they can be bought in exchange for a chicken or a few pounds of rice. This page links to information about the plague of small arms and efforts to block small arms flows.
New Wars and Small Arms Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean
Latin American and Caribbean countries are not, by and large, major producers or exporters of arms. Nor is the region a major consumer of arms. According to research on small arms and light weapons transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean (using statistics from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database), between 2004 and 2006, countries in the region exported US $6.7 billion worth of arms and imported US $6.5 billion worth of arms. Compared to the global trade in arms, these figures are relatively small; just six percent of global arms transfers involved Latin America and only three percent involved the Caribbean.
Yet despite these circumstances, Latin America and the Caribbean are disproportionately affected by violence, particularly small arms violence. In fact, the region is now one of the most violent in the world — home to 42 percent of all firearms-related homicides globally, according to the World Health Organization.3 The Caribbean has the highest murder rate in the world (estimated at 30 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants), followed closely by Latin America (25 homicides per 100,000). (By comparison, the U.S. murder rate is 5.6 per 100,000 and Canada’s rate is 1.85 per 100,000.) Estimates by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank put the cost of crime and violence in the region at more than 14 percent of regional gross domestic product.
The startling number of homicides alone draws attention, but it is only part of the story. Serious human rights abuses are also widespread and persistent. The forced displacement of civilian populations, the excessive use of force and ill-treatment by security forces, disappearances, torture, the presence of paramilitary groups, and the murder and rape of women as gender-based crimes — all of these are part of everyday life for a significant segment of the population in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and others. These are environments without war, yet not at peace.
Fighting New Wars:A distinction between wars (violence between states or political organized groups for political reasons), organized crime (private violence by private organized groups and for private reasons, usually for economic profit) and mass human rights violations (violence against people by states or political organized groups) is becoming increasingly difficult to make, not only in Latin America, but globally.
This typology of violence includes what Mary Kaldor calls “new wars,” where violence is omnipresent, more directed at civilians, and distinctions between war and crime are blurred.4 At the beginning of the 21st century, the international community has succeeded in freezing traditional conflicts. A central part of the problem is the incapacity of the state to maintain sovereignty, control physical territory and build popular cohesion, which leads to disorder and fragmentation.
A general sense of insecurity is created and then feeds on itself, promoting violence, especially armed violence. When the state fails to do its duty to provide security, private actors try to impose versions of security that suit their own needs. In this kind of situation, the social contract ceases to exist.
The question that should be asked when evaluating proliferation concerns is not “was a transaction legal or not,” but rather, “what are the consequences for the security of regions, states, communities and individuals” of a particular arms transfer? Only then can effective and comprehensive regulation of conventional arms be achieved.
Mission:The Committee will begin its whole work by holding a general debate on all disarmament and international security agenda items. The delegates will talk about the major problems that small arms and transnational crime represent in the security of all countries. Then after all ideas have been gathered together, they will write a resolution to help solve this problems that all countries can be happy with.
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