DISARMAMENT: Setback for U.S. Gun-Makers

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 16 1999 (IPS) - The National Rifle Association (NRA), the most powerful gun lobby in the United States, has always defended the right of adult Americans to carry arms.

“Guns don’t kill people”, the NRA argues. “People kill people.”

Not so, says a Federal District Court in New York which holds 15 U.S. gun makers liable for several deaths caused by firearms manufactured by the companies.

In a landmark judgement last week, the court turned around the NRA’s argument by virtually ruling that it is not people, but gun manufacturers who kill people.

The U.S. companies – including Colt, Smith and Wesson, and Beretta USA – were taken to court by a group of six people who filed a class action suit on behalf of friends and relatives who were victims of gunfire or who had survived shootings.

“The fact that a jury has said that the firearms industry is responsible when a gun functions as it was so designed, is just as huge as a jury finding that the cigarette industry has contributed to an individual’s lung cancer,” says Kristen Rand, a lawyer with the Washington-based Violence Policy Centre.

Currently, the U.S. tobacco industry is fighting a losing battle against scores of lawsuits brought by individuals whose relatives have died of lung cancer. The industry also has been sued by dozens of city and state governments in the U.S. who sought reimbursements for millions of dollars spent on medical costs for cancer patients in state-run hospitals.

Now a wave of lawsuits is expected against the U.S. arms industry in the aftermath of the New York court ruling. Already, five U.S. cities, including Chicago in the state of Illinois and Miami in the state of Florida, have filed suit against the gun industry. Both cities want the industry to reimburse them for police and health care costs triggered by shootings.

Richard Feldman, spokesman for the American Shooting Sports Council, argues that the gun industry makes weapons “not for the bad guys but for the good guys.” If the criminals get their hands on a gun, he says, it is not the manufacturer’s fault. “If we could design a gun for the bad guy, they would all shoot backward.”

In 1997, sales of U.S. tobacco products amounted to more than 48 billion dollars compared with to 1.4 billion dollars by gun manufacturers.

Still, James Baker of the NRA says his organisation is gearing for a “long ardous process…and we are going to devote a lot of time and resources to it,” he said.

The fresh wave of public anger against firearm manufacturers comes at a time when the United Nations has itself launched a global campaign against small arms seeking to cut off the flow of light weapons from the world’s battle zones.

The United Nations argues that small arms– including assault rifles, grenade launchers, landmines, machine guns, mortars, and pistols – are primarily responsible for most of the killings in ethnic conflicts and civil wars throughout the world.

The 185-member General Assembly last year adopted a resolution calling for an international conference on the illicit arms trade. The meeting, to be held in Geneva in the year 2001, will attempt to set up a UN mechanism to track the movement of small arms as they make their way into the hands of rebel groups and terrorist organisations.

Former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali admitted that the United Nations was not doing enough to curb the proliferation of small arms. “The world is awash with them and trafficking is very difficult to monitor, let alone intercept,” he said.

The current Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who resurrected the UN’s Department for Disarmament Affairs, is seeking a subregional moratorium on trafficking in small arms. “A precedent exists,” he says, citing a self-imposed arms embargo by Latin American countries in November 1997.

Every member of the Organisation of American States (OAS) has signed the Inter-American Convention against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials.

The Convention is aimed at reducing the flow of small arms into that region.

UN Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala, who heads the Department for Disarmament Affairs, says there is a sense of great urgency for “prompt and effective global action” to restrict the flow of small arms.

According to Dhanapala, about 500 million small arms are floating around the world. “Small arms have been or are the primary or sole tools of violence in most of the recent armed conflicts dealt with by the United Nations where fighting involves irregular troops,” he says.

Recent conflicts, in which small arms have caused death and destruction, have taken place in Rwanda, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Chechnya, Georgia, Guatemala, Liberia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka.

In contrast to Hollywood actor Charlton Heston, who heads the NRA, movie star Michael Douglas, is now a UN ambassador of Peace battling the US arms industry.

According to Douglas, the dramatic increase in civilian deaths is a direct result of the ease with which so many people in so many countries supporting so many causes can obtain small arms.

“An AK-47 assault rifle can be purchased for a few dollars in Albania. It can be exchanged for a chicken in Uganda. It can be bought for a sack of corn in Mozambique. It can be bartered for a loaf of bread in Chechnya,” he says.

“That’s why death and destruction has spread around the world.”