Is it possible to control international arms trading?

No

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by Lyman Stone

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International arms trading cannot be controlled on any scale. You cannot stop bulk arms shipments and you certainly cannot stop smaller ones, nor can you even have a prayer of stopping the shipment of firearm parts. It just isn't possible.

In nations such as Pakistan, India, Iran, Afghanistan, and Israel, many people know how to make firearms. I repeat: how to MAKE them. Give them a pile of basic parts and a few weeks, and these gunsmiths will produce you a weapon. Tens of thousands of firearms are assembled, essentially, invisibly. Sometimes in basements, sometimes in shops, anywhere. You cannot stop people from creating their own weapons. You cannot stop the trading of the parts to do it just because they are so easy to come buy, many are innocent-looking enough, and many can be fashioned independently.

But, admittedly, those weapons are not always the most reliable weapons. The real concern is vast arms trading in industrial quality and quantity. Here, again, I believe control is impossible. The nation will always have rogue states such as Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. There will always be arms manufacturing companies with excess stock to sell, and there will always be people in charge of some corporations who sympathize with extremist groups. I suppose the government, theoretically, could purchase and destroy all those excess firearms... but I personally think that's a waste of taxdollars. You won't catch them all, and it's just further hurting the free market.

Another idea for controlling international arms trading is tighter border security. This is even more unrealistic. No nation has ever made a perfect border security program. None. Never. Every border has had things smuggled through, especially in ports. The government simply can't check every single container on a ship, and if even one of them is containing, say, dismantled AK-47s, that's enough firepower to outfit more than a few cells of terrorists, or a regiment or so of soldiers. Border security can't be perfect. More regulation and security might help some, but it won't control the arms trade.

Lastly we have to remember that the arms trade is exactly that: trade, commerce. It is not meant to be controlled. Some may revile me on this one because that's such a heartless thing to say when people are dying because of this trade. Well, true, but people die in every trade. If you refuse to participate in things bought by blood then become a vegan and move into a cave in the mountains: society is built on the blood of those who came before. Every society through all of time, except the very, very first society in each area, is built on the blood of those who came before. The arms trade is a massive business. Putting more restraints on it and hurting it's profit margin will make thousands of people jobless, putting more strain on welfare, and more unemployment. It's a tradeoff, you see.

But this does raise the question of what we should do about the arms trade. Controlling it isn't a realistic option for numerous reasons. So we must find an alternative. That alternative is a radical cultural shift. The buyer nations need to have a cultural change in them, they need to put aside their ethnic squabbles and swuch backwards, uncivilized barbarism (yes, I'm aware my own nation has it's own history of such things). The seller nations need to aquire, as nations, a conscience. I do not mean that the governments of those nations need to crack down, I mean the PEOPLE of those nations need to change. The government(and even, tos ome extent, the big arms companies) isn't the problem. We are the problem.

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