An article from Emily Schwartz Greco "Too Many Guns" a good read

[Union Label]

This article gets right to the core of this epidemic.

FPIF Column
Too Many Guns
Frida Berrigan | October 23, 2008

Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco




Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org


We've heard a lot about gun control and the second amendment in this election season. A McCain-Palin poster, featuring Alaska's 44-year-old governor with a big gun and the viewer in her rifle sights, is just one of the more graphic indications that gun control is a lightning-rod issue that distracts, distorts, and dismays.

More than 200 years after our founding fathers enshrined the right to "bear arms" in our Constitution, we have more arms than we can bear. Wars are fought, fortunes are made, and nations rise and fall on these weapons. At the human-to-human level crimes are committed, vengeance is taken, rage is given full range, and terror is wreaked from the barrel of these weapons.

The United States is the world's largest arms-supplying nation. In 2007, the United States entered into over $19.1 billion in Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreements with other nations and for 2008, sales of military goods and services mushroomed to $34 billion — triple the volume of the Bush administration's first year.

U.S. exports range from combat aircraft to Pakistan, Greece, and Chile to small arms and light weapons to the Philippines, Egypt, and Georgia. Since the beginning of the war on terror, the United States has transferred more than $88 billion in weapons and military material through the Foreign Military Sales channel. In 2006 and 2007, U.S. weapons and military training went to over 168 states and territories. But it's not just big weapons systems transferred legally.
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5619

[AndyTiedye]

1. Everything Else We Used to Make Has Been Outsourced

[Possumpoint]

2. WIth This One Issue

Democrats keep trying to lose elections.

[ArmedAmerican]

3. yeah let's just focus on getting the Republican criminals out of office

and not muck around with gun control, it's not going to get the Dems anywhere good.

[Union Label]

4. Then I guess we can agree to disagree

This is a very important issue for citizens of the world.

[-..__...]

5. Another cluless day dreamer.

"Shouldn't a global treaty against guns be next?"

Apparently she's unaware of (or poorly educated about), the 2nd amendment of the Bill of Rights.

[aikoaiko]

6. "Shouldn't a global treaty against guns be next? " uh..NO!

The root of the problem is not guns, but the idotic "war on drugs". Frida Berrigan, you're an idiot.