Preventing Smaller Regional Wars
Armed ethnic or militia groups, maybe under a the command of a warlord, often have little reason to go on fighting except that they are in the habit of fighting, and seem not to know how to stop, or what else they can do to earn a living. This last reason might be amenable to management, by being trained up and employed as policemen, or as rangers, or even as soldiers for the Government, but to do that, we have talk to them, and to do that, it is necessary to clear the air of flying bullets.
There is one sure and simple way of achieving this: cut off their supplies of ammunition. Between 10 and 14 billion bullets are manufactured every year. Of this enormous quantity, there is an official trace for only 17%.
Guns are durable goods that can be easily hidden in trucks and ships for transport across borders. Guns have no distinctive smell, apart from the oil that coats them, which is indistinguishable from the smell of any other new, oiled machinery, so investigators have to make a visual or X ray inspection to confirm that a truck contains armaments rather than common machinery. In short, it is difficult to control arms transactions, arms transfers, arms exports and arms caches.
Ammunition and explosives on the other hand all have a distinctive smel. Detector dogs are routinely trained to identify the presence of ammunition and explosives. It costs around £5,000 ($6,700) to train one dog, takes 10-12 weeks, and that dog has a working life of about 8 years.
Without ammunition, a gun is just an expensive club, and a militia is a gang of men without a purpose.
Countries and agencies that invested in detector dogs could prevent the transfer of lethal products across their borders, swiftly and easily identifying consignments of ammunition by walking a trained dog in the vicinity.
Authorities might even be able to use the dogs to lead searches for ammunitions caches and munitions factories by driving them across parts of the country where caches and factories might be located.
Detector dogs are an established and effective way of identifying the presence of ammunition. Therefore the many agencies with an interest in preventing the suffering and death that follows the use of small arms should concentrate on controlling the ammunition, as well as the arms.
Given the political will, it would be a relatively simple matter to train up and deploy large numbers of dogs that could identify consignments of ammunition in order to confiscate and destroy them.
Small wars are solvable, given the political will.
It is our job as voters to create political will by writing to our democratic representatives.
