Guns and Bodies: Armed Conflict and Domestic Violence

There is a class of weapons known to arms manufacturers, arms traders and arms control activists as ‘SALW’: Small Arms and Light Weapons. They do not excite as much public concern as nuclear devices and chemical weapons, but arguably, given their numbers, their spread and death toll, they too are ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The Small Arms Survey estimates there are currently around 900 million in circulation worldwide. They are produced by more than a thousand manufacturing companies located in nearly a hundred countries, and assembled from components whose origins are still more widespread. Only a quarter of these weapons are thought to be in the armouries of state security sectors, the remainder are in the hands of ‘non-state’ military elements, or of ordinary civilians. Guns are a material element in the time-and-space continuum of violence. They span pre-war, war, postwar and peace. Of the estimated three-quarters of a million deaths in armed violence annually worldwide, around two-fifths are believed to occur in actual armed conflict while three-fifths occur far from the battlefield – or rather they happen in the battlefield of everyday life, in murders, suicides and accidents.1