The Utne Reader has a short but clear look at how the United States is singularly standing in the way of the UN’s efforts against illegal firearms. In a recent vote against exporting firearms to areas already torn apart by violence and war, we stood alone– but on the wrong side of the issue.
On October 26, the United Nations voted on a resolution to lay the groundwork for a treaty that would curb exporting arms to conflict areas or areas known for human rights abuses. The resolution passed 139 to 1, with 24 abstentions. The lone opponent? The world’s largest arms exporter, the United States.
“The United Nations wants to keep weapons on the global market from falling into the hands of despots and guerillas,” writes Joshua Gallu in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel’s online English edition. The arms trade treaty would cover both large arms, such as tanks and helicopters, as well as small arms, which have been known to destabilize countries. This recent vote pushed forward a two-part process of enacting a treaty, slated to take shape over the course of the next few years.
It’s painfully clear that our gun policies, in the UN and elsewhere, aren’t determined by our citizens’ wishes. The majority of Americans want stronger gun laws, and there’s no reason to allow the exporting of weapons into these wartorn areas around the world. Except for the reason provided by the gun industry– as the largest exporter of arms in the world by far, they’ve coerced the United States’ interests in the UN into being their own. And as a result of our loony gun policy, it’s costing us goodwill, and costing the rest of the world lives.
Many are critical of the US for voting against the latest push for international standards, especially since other top arms producers like the United Kingdom and the other European Union nations all voted otherwise. Critics say that with the United States and arms-supplying nations like Russia and China, which abstained voting, not participating, the treaty’s potential effectiveness is compromised.
The United States has countered with an interesting argument. According to Richard Grenell, spokesperson for the US mission to the United Nations, the United States considers the international agency’s effort “so far below what we are already required to do under US law that we had to vote against it in order to maintain our higher standards.”
Right. Did you catch the argument in there? He says that the resolution was so weak, they had to vote against it to maintain their higher standards. He’s right, this resolution is weak– but it’s meant for places that have no rules at all in place. Something is better than nothing, and the US’s argument that they’re waiting for something better doesn’t hold water.
But given that an estimated 70 percent of the United States’ arms sales end up in the hands of human rights abusers and undemocratic regimes, not everyone is buying it. Hartung points out that powerful pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association have been lobbying against the treaty in Washington. And while the US continues its campaign against weapons of mass destruction, Hartung suggests the US has a lot to gain from the spread of “slow motion weapons of mass destruction” — those smaller arms responsible for steadily climbing death rates in areas of conflict. Ironically, it’s American soldiers who may benefit the most from reining in the sale of such weapons. As Hartung notes, a Johns Hopkins University study found that more than half of the US troops killed in Iraq have been on the wrong side of an AK-47.
Even worse, that gun pointed at our soldiers is more and more likely to come from us in the first place. In an editorial today, the New York Times looks at another effect of our huge weapons exporting– lots f our guns are ending up in Iraq, the place we’re supposed to be ending violence, not funding it.
About the last thing the United States ought to be doing in Iraq is funneling weapons into black-market weapons bazaars, as sectarian militias arm themselves for civil war. Yet that is just what Washington may have been doing for the past several years, thanks to an inexplicable decision that standard Pentagon regulations for registering weapons transfers did not apply to the Iraq war.
Of more than 500,000 weapons turned over to the Iraqi Ministries of Defense and Interior since the American invasion — including rocket-propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns and sniper rifles — the serial numbers of only 12,128 were properly recorded. Some 370,000 of these weapons, some of which are undoubtedly being used to kill American troops, were paid for by United States taxpayers, under the Orwellian-titled Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund.
It’s insanity. The gun industry is selling guns to our soldiers so they can go overseas and fight “insurgents” armed with… the gun industry’s guns. Human beings are dying all over the world from this gun violence, and the gun industry is making a mint off of the violence, and laughing all the way to the bank.
Our gun culture, funded and fermented by the NRA, doesn’t just hurt our citizens (although it does do that as well). It is affecting our position in the world, and inflicting pain, death, and suffering on humanity all over the globe. The sooner we wrest control of the policy from the gun lobby, and deliver it back to our citizens, the better off the whole world will be.
