We Arm The World

We Arm The World
William D. Hartung
October 27, 2006

While the U.S. hangs its foreign policy on preventing the spread of “weapons of mass destruction” (a worthy goal, however grossly the Bush administration goes about achieving it), it continues to ignore a more immediate threat—the proliferation of small arms and light weapons—that deserves serious attention as well. These low-tech arms have been described as “slow motion weapons of mass destruction,” because they are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths over the past dozen years, from the genocide in Rwanda to the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet yesterday, the United States, the world's largest supplier of small arms, was the only country to vote against an historic United Nations proposal to curb traffic in arms....

Ummm, yeah, we may arm it but we sure as fuck don't control the hired guns. Who does? Good fucking question.