In the opening to the wonderful black-comedy satire on the international arms trade, Lord of War, we follow the life of a bullet as it moves from a Russian assembly line into the skull of an African child soldier. Set to the tune of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” it is a powerful testimonial to the pernicious effects that one particular industry – the small arms trade – has on world affairs. Indeed, for those in the know, it is clear that more people are killed by small arms annually than have ever been killed by weapons of mass destruction, the mere rumor of which starts wars.
Given the ability of small arms to destabilize entire countries, fuel conflict and arm criminal gangs and extremist militias the world over, you would think the closest thing the world has to a global sheriff, the United States government, would have a vested interest in at least somewhat regulating the flow of machine guns across international borders. You would, of course, be wrong. No, despite the heroic efforts of State Department officials and U.N. negotiators to come up with a small arms treaty so watered down in its effects as to be nearly useless, the American gun lobby – in cooperation with several authoritarian governments like China, Iran and Russia – killed it.
The treaty, officially known as the Arms Trade Treaty, would have established international guidelines in order to “prevent, combat and eradicate the illicit trade in conventional arms and their diversion to illegal and unauthorized end use.” How it would do this was a bit vague, but in theory, the treaty would mandated that national governments track arms sales and then provide this data for inspection by international monitors to assure that no arms, for instance, had been sold to known terrorist front organizations or international drug cartels via disreputable third parties. In other words, it would create one more bureaucratic hoop to jump through and an additional level of corrupt officials to pay off for bad guys, like the folks chopping off heads in Mexico, to get their hands on military-grade small arms.
In the grand scheme of things, this is small stuff. The treaty would have done little to stop the actual flow of arms across borders beyond paperwork. It would have in no way affected the ability of any citizen in any country in the world to buy and own guns if it is already legal to do so in the country they reside in. At best, it is a statement of belief by the world’s governments that an ocean of small arms flowing to bad actors around the world is dangerous, should be regulated, and, by golly, we should do something about it. It was, for all intents and purposes, a symbolic treaty – much like many others we, and others, have signed and ignored.
But even this symbolic statement of support was too much for the likes of Chris Cox, chief lobbyist of the National Rifle Association, who declared the treaty was an evil plot by “the world’s socialist, tyrannical and dictatorial regimes” to “implement international gun registration requirements, bans on commonly owned firearms, tracking and registration of ammunition purchases, and create a new U.N. gun control bureaucracy, thus fulfilling President Barack Obama’s vision for America.” Of course, this makes no sense whatsoever and is blatantly at odds with what the treaty would actually entail, but for people who believe the president is a Muslim and that U.N. black helicopters will soon be landing blue-helmeted thugs in their back yard so as to round them up into camps, asking for an honest assessment of reality is like asking a chimp to understand mathematics. It just isn’t going to happen.
Instead, what did happen was that the NRA lobbying machine – long used to deflecting criticism of domestic gun massacres like the recent ones in Aurora, Colo. and Oak Creek, Wis. – flew into action. Like a mighty Wurlitzer, only with gun barrels instead of organ pipes, the NRA rounded up 58 senators on both sides of the aisle to sign letters condemning the treaty and its “anti-freedom” agenda. And so, a treaty that would have done little beyond saying the unregulated flow of arms across the world is probably not a good thing went down to defeat before it was ever really negotiated – doomed by amoral arms manufacturers the world over and the paranoia of conservative activists here in the United States.
The tragedy of all this is not that the treaty, but for domestic opposition, would have prevented scenes like the one depicted in the opening to Lord of War. Far from it. No, the tragedy is that we cannot even symbolically come down on the side of angels for fear of angering a parochial domestic interest which views instruments that have no other purpose than to kill and maim as sacred. The irony, of course, is that the next time a country is destabilized by AK-47-wielding militiamen, there will be an inevitable call by “someone” to intervene in order to prevent innocents from being massacred. Guess who that someone will be? Just think, if we had that treaty, the next time a GI gets shot by an insurgent somewhere, we might have been able to tell where that gun came from and who supplied it. Now, instead of just looking up serial numbers in a database, we’ll have to pry the information from their cold, dead hands.