The first discussion is about the international small arms trade and the havoc it is causing in less developed countries including Haiti. Some of the speakers focus in on the disarmament initiative there:
Mr. Peter Goldring: As well, Oxfam was involved in the Haiti interim cooperation framework. This was done several years ago, in 2004. At that time it identified the disarmament and collection of what looked like 25,000 weapons to be collected and destroyed. Do you have any idea how many of those were actually collected and destroyed? What is your opinion on the progress of that?
...
Mr. Mark Fried: There are lots of them. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but certainly there are plenty of weapons.
Mr. Peter Goldring: If you're going into the same numbers you were
before, which is about one weapon for ten people, that would seem to suggest
there are 800,000 there, and removing 5,000 would really be a drop in the
bucket, wouldn't it?
...
Mr. Peter Van Loan: If I may, Mr. Chair, I think you're running into a problem that this committee has for some time been studying Haiti and we've heard evidence that one of the biggest problems they're encountering there is the question of order and arms in places like Cité Soleil. According to the police we've heard from, very little progress
has been made on disarming. That's why there's some frustration here, and you
just happened to run into that.
I'm of two minds on this. Yes, I agree that the international small arms trade is a cynical, bloody part of the world economy that is responsible for perpetuating human misery. It occurs to me as I write that Nicholas Cage acted in a movie ("Lord of War") as one such dealer in that trade.
On the other hand, when I hear about attempts to disarm people in Cite Soleil, I get a little cynical. The "armed gangs" that Aristide was always supposed to be supporting were being compared to what, exactly? The brutal and corrupt military and police forces that constantly betrayed the will of the Haitian people?
And now, in the face of Western-coddled death squads like the Little Machete Gang and the trigger-happy MINUSTAH force itself, the weapons of the people of Cite Soleil are supposed to be confiscated?
This is MINUSTAH we're talking about remember:
In the early morning hours of July 6, 2005 more than 350
UN troops stormed the seaside shantytown of Cite Soleil in a military operation
with the stated purpose of halting violence in Haiti. When the shooting stopped
seven hours later, more than 26 people, the majority of them unarmed civilians
lie dead with scores more wounded. Officially, the UN responded that they only
opened fire after being fired upon and discounted non-combatant casualities.
Further, the UN claimed that only six people, who they described as "bandits,"
had been killed during the military operation.
It's a sick situation. Obviously, in this poor, desperate society, some gun-owners are going to engage in murder and theft. Others are enemies of the people. But others require their guns to protect them from the forces we've set against them.
On guns and gun control in general, I offer the following reflections:
In his movie "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore did not say that Americans owned more guns than Canadians. Statistically speaking, Canadians own more guns per person than do Americans. Perhaps there is something in the culture of the USA that makes them more likely to shoot each other, or perhaps it has something to do with the greater proportion handguns in urban environments as opposed to Canadians' greater proportion of hunting rifles in rural and wilderness regions.
If it's a cultural thing, I worry that with the growth of our cities and the advances in telecommunications that makes US cultural products even more pervasive than previously, we will see an increase in our own gun culture here in Canada. Especially as Canadian economic policy seems determined to recreate the same slum conditions that supposedly justify the US gun culture.
I'm not advocating censorship on this though. For one thing, we could reverse the immiserating economic policies of the Liberal-Conservative parties (at both the federal and provincial levels) and we could invest money in efforts to meet this onslaught of gun culture at the community and mass media level.
Regarding Canada's present gun control system, I don't own a gun, so the supposed problems of the gun registry and oversight of firearms and their owners aren't a pressing concern for me. I haven't read or studied the issue at any length. However, if what I've heard is true, the gun registry and other gun laws are too invasive, and seem to smack of totalitarian police state regimes. And given that in the past we owned more guns than the Americans did, with far less of a problem of gun violence, I believe that our present expensive system might also be unnecessary.
Something is obviously rotten with the United States gun culture. We should find out what it is and take concerted steps to avoid it here. I don't believe our present gun control laws are the answer though. If they're as invasive as they sound, they should be repealed.
I don't believe that small arms are an unimitigated right, or that they serve as an effective counterweight to state power. I also believe that they do impact on the level of crimes (including violent crimes like murder and rape), and that this holds true for Cite Soleil as well as anywhere else. At the same time, I can't wholeheartedly support the attempts to disarm the people of Haiti given the nature of the forces that the countries of France, the USA, and Canada, have set against them.
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