Physician Group Calls for Response to Global Gun Violence

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Physician Group Calls for Response to Global Gun Violence 10/3/01An international physicians organization is calling upon health professionals, scientists, and activists to bring the consequences of "the small arms pandemic" around the world to greater public understanding. Nearly 200 conferees met in Helsinki, Finland, Sept. 28-30 at an event sponsored by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) to examine the medical implications of small arms and develop a response. IPPNW spokesman Brian Rawson told Join Together Online that this gathering, with its goal of fashioning an international medical response to gun violence, is the first of its kind."We're calling on medical professionals to consider this problem as something they have a role in solving, and that prevention is the most effective angle for us to take," he said. "It's a public-health approach -- that it's not just a medical person's duty to stitch up people once they've been wounded, but to take a role in preventing this from happening."With hundreds of millions of small arms in the hands of armies, law enforcers, and civilians around the globe, and with large profits to be made by arms manufacturers and middlemen eager to exploit a lucrative black market, the task of preventing related death and injury is a daunting one. But a logical first step, Rawson said, is for medical professionals to push for improved data-collection systems worldwide. For instance, while there's general agreement that there are at least 500 million small arms in the world, nobody really knows. Also missing are accurate data on how many people they kill and wound and what indirect health costs they may exact.Some accurate data are known, however, and point to a heavy American involvement in the global arms trade. A recent report by the Congressional Research Service showed that the U.S. was the world's leading arms merchant in 2000 with $18.6 billion in sales, 70 percent of the weapons going to the developing world, where small arms tend to be the weapon of choice in regional conflicts. Nevertheless, in July, the U.S. stonewalled a United Nations conference which examined the global small-arms trade on the grounds that it wanted nothing to with anything that might either restrict civilian gun ownership or allow governments to block arms sales to nongovernmental groups. Rawson said that the American laissez faire position on arms -- both domestically and globally -- occupied much of the discussion in Helsinki.First, he said, the lack of regulation in the U.S. combined with the international black market creates a powerful profit incentive to smuggle small arms where there's strong demand. (According to the UN, approximately half of the small arms in the world are illegal, and the annual trade in illegal small arms is estimated at about $1 billion.) Furthermore, American efforts to undermine various governmental regimes by arming rebels has had broad consequences. "First of all, getting the arms to (insurgents) requires several middle men, who can siphon off arms and divert them to the illegal market," Rawson said. "Second, even when they do arrive to their intended recipients, those people may not be in our best interests in the long run. They may be extremists, like we're seeing in Afghanistan. The people who rose to power there benefited greatly from U.S. military aid."Another consequence of arming one side or another is that after the conflict is finished, the guns often stay in civilian hands and continue to wreak havoc. Central America, for instance, has continued to suffer from gun violence even though the military conflicts of the 1980s have run their courses.The timing of the Helsinki conference meant that it was overshadowed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that have shocked the world. But as Rawson said in a statement at the conference's conclusion, "we recognize that the continued injury and loss that daily attends the deliberate or indiscriminate use of small arms is no less shocking to the affected individuals and their families."One generally quoted statistic about the current state of the many small wars that continue to afflict the globe is that some 80 percent of casualties now are civilians -- compared with 14-percent civilian deaths in World War I. Rawson said the 80-percent figure is really guesswork; he cites it as a reason for calling upon medical professionals to mount a campaign for scientific data collection to better understand the costs of all the regional conflicts and the international arms trade that supplies them.While the competing political, social, and religious forces that cause conflicts can be complex, the outcome of the Helsinki conference was to call upon medical professionals, scientists, activists, and government representatives to focus on global gun violence not as a law-enforcement or national-security problem, but as a broad, public-health challenge."Physicians are challenged by the immediate needs of victims and by the long and costly physical and psychological rehabilitation needed by so many," the concluding Medical Call to Action states. "We are called to describe the grim reality of mutilation and loss so that the human victim, rather than the bullet or the gun, is seen clearly as central to the issue -- We further recognize a continuum of violent conflict, from homicides and criminal violence to intrastate wars up to and including nuclear war that are all linked by the ways in which people justify meeting violence with violence."According to IPPNW, small arms, light weapons, and firearms have claimed roughly a half million lives a year in recent years -- 200,000 of them not related to combat. In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., Americans are more acutely aware of the trauma that the killing of innocent civilians can cause an entire nation. Thus, perhaps, Americans might better understand the U.S. role in the international small-arms trade and the plight of countries that have suffered high civilian casualty rates as a result. http://www.jointogether.org/gv/wire/features/reader.jtml?Object_ID=546008