by Jurgen Brauer, October 2007
Copyright: J. Brauer. No reproduction without permission.

The dictator knew well what weapons he wanted but occasionally bungled his English, earning him an arms dealer’s incongruous lessons: it’s warlord, and bloodbath, not lord of war or blood of bath.

The movie Lord of War, starring Nicolas Cage, was released for the Fall 2005 season. In it, the dictator of a West African nation knew well what weapons he wanted but occasionally he bungled his English, earning him an arms dealer’s incongruous lessons: it’s warlord, and bloodbath, not lord of war or bath of blood.

The weapons the dealer sold were, for the most part, so-called small arms and light weapons, small arms for short. That’s a euphemism. Small arms, pistols, revolvers, rifles, and the like, amount to big killing. The most widely cited number of killings due to small arms, first produced in 2001, runs to over 500,000 people annually – easily the equivalent of several major wars; even the daily carnage in Iraq does not yield that many deaths in a year’s time – and splits into some 200,000 homicides and suicides and a further 300,000 killed in intra or interstate armed violence. Not merely a bath, then, but a sizeable swimming pool of blood. A dictator’s delight.

While homicide and suicide statistics are relatively straightforward, the other number – for conflict deaths – has since been refined and clarified. We really don’t know what the actual number is. It needs to be estimated. The toll includes deaths directly attributable to firearms abuse and indirect deaths, the “excess mortality” attributable to the consequences of violent armed conflict due to for example the interference with the work of humanitarian relief agencies, the closing of emergency food delivery routes, and the destruction of health clinics and medical supplies.

While 60 to 90 percent of all direct conflict deaths are attributed to small arms and light weapons, it is thought that by far the majority of deaths are the “excess” deaths – the estimated number of deaths that would not have occurred were it not for violent armed conflict. Not only is it necessary to find ways of limiting the misuse and abuse of firearms; it is equally important to limit the follow-on deaths. The continuing dying in western Sudan – Darfur – illustrates this.

Beyond the deaths, there is a further number – uncounted but likely affecting millions each year – of injured, crippled, and traumatized people and those whose lives are put on hold by being held hostage to the gun. Private economic activity stalls as no one – no peasant, no craftsman, no small or big-time domestic or foreign entrepreneur – wants to invest in a climate of fear. Scarce resources of time, effort, and money are diverted to deal with the threat of violence. States’ tax collection suffers from impeded economic activity and already scantily supplied social services fully collapse. Those who are injured incur medical expenses and/or reduced productivity, often for life. Many require permanent care, affecting yet others.

One might expect an economist to write on the latest gyrations of the real estate or stock market, or of interest or exchange rates. A lofty flight of fancy, this, for the victims of the gun, for how can economic development, let alone prosperity, happen in lands bereft of security? Worse, even pacified societies are not necessarily peaceful. Sadly, many nations suffer from more armed violence post-conflict than during conflict. In El Salvador, for example, “more people have been killed in ten years of peace than died in the previous twelve years of war,” writes Rachel Stohl of the Center for Defense Information. (And, as wars go, that war was a nasty one.) Thus, the first order of business is to afford people security about their person, their families, and their property. All other economics – such as the vagaries of interest rates and real estate that have so many people tied up in a tiff these days – comes thereafter.

Paul Collier, an economics professor at Oxford University, has determined that, compared to the 1980s, civil wars in the 1990s and early 2000s lasted longer. They also reduced economic growth rates, on average, by 2 percentage points, a staggering number, considering how small such growth rates often are to begin with. (El Salvador managed a per capita growth rate of zero during the war, and of only about 1.4 percent since.) The post-conflict environment frequently remains volatile, with a high probability of civil war recurrence and spill-over effects to neighboring states. Consequently, those who can move physical, financial, and human capital – themselves, or some kin – out of the country will do so, thereby further diminishing their home countries’ economic prospects. Much of this is reviewed in Collier’s recent, much praised book, The Bottom Billion (Oxford University Press, 2007). Whereas Lord of War is short on facts and improbably highlights the personal drama of an arms dealer rather than of his victims, Collier’s book is full of facts and highlights potential solutions to the discomforts the world’s poorest suffer.

In another recent book, Private Guns, Public Health (University of Michigan Press, 2006), David Hemenway of Harvard University, also an economist, takes us through a cost accounting of gun-related violence in the United States, just as Collier does for developing countries. In both cases, the adverse effects of small arms are far-reaching, geographically, over time, and economically. I have no particular qualm with legal gun-ownership and proper use. But misuse and abuse, surely we can agree on this, must be stopped. Gun-rights activists and opponents must come together, commit to and search for common ground, and advocate feasible, joint solutions.