The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

The Sunday news wires bring us tales of mayhem in many parts of the world -- sixteen Christians shot in a Pakistan church, three Israelis mowed down in a drive-by, at least six people killed by a bomb in a Phillipine lunch spot. Incidents like these point up one the less-appreciated predicaments of our times: there are too many small arms loose in the world. There are especially too many automatic rifles, machine carbines, grenades, and C-4-type plastic explosives. Combine this with the fact that there are enormous multitudes of people -- especially young men -- who are under-employed, poor, and angry, and you have a recipe for unending round-the-clock massacres. In fact, one could advance the theory that the world has now reached a kind of critical mass of both small arms and angry young men.

I doubt that we can diminish the supply of small arms and ammunition by any sort of deliberate campaign at any point along the supply chain. These guns, bullets, and bombs exist because there is a tremendous secondary market in military ordnance produced under contract by even respectable governments . No western nation that I know of, including the ones that rail against political violence (the US, France, Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, even Sweden), has done anything to decrease their production of armaments. What's more, the number of rifles, pistols, carbines and grenade-type bombs already in existence is so astronomical that angry young men of the world can get them virtually for free anytime they want one.

One of the grim consequences is that it takes very few young men armed with automatic weapons to carry out deadly operations that can disturb the peace and security of the whole world. One young zealot with a grenade in Saudi Arabia could put an end to a quarter of America's oil imports and pretty much send the the US economy into the toilet. We can see on CNN how a gang of virtually medieval tribesmen, the Taliban, can withstand an aerial bombardment as withering as all the bombs dropped on Germany during World War Two and still pose a threat to the most powerful war machine the world ever saw. All it takes is one Talibani with a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile (available at any bazaar from Casablanca to Tashkent) to bring down an American plane and turn US public opinion into an anti-war movement. (Are our generals worried about this? You bet.)

I imagine that US strategists at the highest level have no idea what they are going to do about the small arms problem. I surely don't. Except that it's another one of those things that makes me think this is going to be a long, hard, bitter struggle.