Gun ownership said to parallel city security

GENEVA — Last week, professor Keith Krause, program director of the Small Arms Survey at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, discussed the findings of the Small Arms Survey 2007: Guns and the City with The Washington Times reporter John Zarocostas. The annual report on global small-arms violence is funded by United States, European governments and the United Nations.

Question: The survey shows a worldwide increase of civilians holding small arms. You estimate that 650 million small arms, 75 percent of the total 875 million worldwide, are owned by civilians. What’s behind this?

Answer: I think there’s lots of reasons, but the main one is generally increasing wealth in some parts of the world that make people able to buy weapons and, frankly, the failure of many states to provide for the security of individuals and their communities, which leads to raising insecurity in urban zones, especially in some parts of Africa and Latin America.

Q: Does carrying a gun convey a false sense of security?

A: Certainly the research shows that holding a gun does not make you safer. But you can understand the reasons that will lead people to try to ensure their protection when there’s no police force or when there’s nothing else to provide for security of their communities or of their families and their property. But it’s clear in many parts of Africa and Latin America, where guns have flooded in the communities, the community as a whole is often less secure because the overall rates of violence have gone up and the intensity of the violence has gone up in some places.

Q: The report records staggering figures for Brazil with 45,000 murders.

A: That figure is the murders overall. Not all are attributed to firearms. The vast majority are [due to] firearms in Brazil, and they’re concentrated both geographically and within particular cities and parts of the country. That raises some difficult questions about how you tackle a problem that is not national in scope but really is concentrated in the border areas, in the favelas of the big cities and in some areas where there’s drug trafficking in gangs and all sorts of other illicit commerce going on.

Q: Why the strong correlation between the increase in the size of cities, especially mega-cities, and increased numbers of armed homicides?

A: We wanted to highlight there’s a shift happening because historically, cities were safer places than the countryside. They were better policed, they were easier to manage, and there were social controls. But with the rise of these mega-cities that have eight, ten, twenty million people, many of whom are living in shantytowns that we wouldn’t recognize as cities, this is a very new dynamic and it creates zones of insecurity — no-go zones where the police don’t even travel into cities — and it creates the conditions that can give rise to a lot of violence, not everywhere, but in a lot of cities.

Q: Is there an increasing trend of certain (younger) age groups holding more guns from your studies?

A: We don’t have enough evidence to know how that may have changed over time. But what we do know is that the principal vector for violence is young men. Young men are both the perpetrators and the victims in the vast majority of cases of firearms used. And that is something that also needs to be paid attention to — where there’s large numbers of young men living in situations of economic inequality and lack of opportunity, the gun and crime in general is a way out and seen the only avenue.

Q: Are there different civilian firearm-violence patterns between developed countries in Western Europe and North America and developing countries in Africa and Latin America?

A: Again, the trend varies by region. One thing that is clearly a problem in Latin America is high levels of interlinked gang violence and violence over control of the drug trade. It’s led, in countries like Guatemala, to higher levels of armed homicide than during the civil war. In parts of Africa, the violence has not reached that level with gangs, and it’s much more associated with political struggles between communities with militias and armed gangs and sometimes so-called defense militias that take the law into their own hands, and that’s not the same thing as in Latin America.

Q: The data show a big difference in the price of a machine gun like a Kalashnikov, which is relatively expensive in Western Europe, averaging $471 each, but the same gun can be bought for about $156 in Africa. Why?

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