WFSA Current News - October, 2004

October 15, 2004

Threat of military arms theft in Thailand
            Yesterday Thailand’s Director-General of the Department of Provincial Administration, Sujarit Patchimnun, issued a statement calling for more intensive supervision of firearms after raids took place on security outposts.
            There are not enough soldiers to provide degrees of protection considered necessary, and so arms are issued to defence volunteers in Thailand border regions.
            However, raids on military stores in countries all over the world have long provided sources of illegal arms. Such stockpiles are natural targets. The statement came after a militant raid on a district office in pursuit of arms. The Director-General wrote to provincial governors warning of the expectation of similar raids in future in Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala.

October 14, 2004

European Union accepts bird hunting
         The EU Environment Commissioner, Margaret Wallstrom, is quoted as saying she “always considered that hunters and bird conservationists have much in common. They each have a sound knowledge of nature and a vested interest in ensuring the continued survival of the species."
            1975 saw the first EU involvement in the area, with the Birds Directive, an intricate statement that has been criticized for failing to understand that hunting is heavily tied to conservation. Bird hunters in particular have a long history of managing wetlands to the benefit of not only quarry species but all waterbirds. On any given wetland, the latter usually outnumber edible species like ducks and geese many times over, and because they share the habitat, they are the direct beneficiaries of the hunters’ funds that go into habitat management. It is no surprise that under these recent guidelines, hunters are not to use large-scale gathering methods such as nets, and are not to hunt during breeding seasons. In reality, these kinds of practices hold no attraction to hunters anyway.
            The article explains that BirdLife International and the Federation of Associations for Hunting and Conservation of the EU joined forces to formulate the guidelines. This also is positive news.

October 12, 2004

Sri Lankan firearms review
            The Public Order and Internal Security Ministry Secretary of Sri Lanka, Tilak Ranaviraja, has announced a study on all aspects of the management of firearms in Sri Lanka. It will require a permanent secretariat. The move is to be funded by the United Nations.
            A National Commission of fifteen members, including three civilians and eight members of the Ministry of Defence, is soon to be formed.
            The move follows increasing concerns about the use of firearms in crime. There is now a two-month amnesty for the surrender of illegal arms.
            The story is available at http://www.dailynews.lk/2004/10/12/pol01.html .

October 8, 2004

Ammunition marking move in California
California, USA, Bill Lockyer, is proposing that every round of handgun ammunition sold legally in California should first be marked with a microscopic laser-etched serial number.
            The recent move for so-called ballistic imaging having been abandoned as impracticable, this idea is an attempt to find a substitute.
            The article (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20041006-9999-1n6gunstamp.html) quotes Randy Rossi, director of the firearms division in the state Department of Justice, as saying that ammunition has a short shelf life. In fact, the opposite is true. There are huge stockpiles of functional war-surplus ammunition decades old.
            The proposal is to link projectile, cartridge case and box with a single number, and to link these to the drivers’ licence of buyers. The amount of ammunition made in the world is vast, and the logistics of the operation are unexplored.
            It is remarkable to think that there are lawmakers who believe the criminal market will be lining up at gun stores with drivers’ licences in hand to buy ammunition over the counter.

October 4, 2004

Governments ignore arms registry
            Canada has recently discovered, the benefits of tracking firearms by this means may be very spurious. Fewer than a third of the 191 member states have been regularly passing the required information to the register.
            An article by Thalif Deen (http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=25721) has highlighted a familiar anomaly. Willing participants do exist, and they comply. The unwilling then reduce the value of the exercise so that in the end, nothing has been achieved. In civilian matters, criminals do not register their guns. In the international forum, it seems many governments take the same line.
            The world’s biggest known arms exporters, including the United Kingdom, the USA, Germany and Russia, send arms to many countries the governments of which do not wish to have any disclosure at all.
            The register specifically excludes small arms. Its ambit is the list of conventional weapons of war: armoured combat vehicles, large artillery systems, fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, warships and missiles, battle tanks and missile launchers. But as nations look at their own inventories and regard the information as being not for general disclosure, they may be doing something very similar to individual civilian gun owners who dispute the value of governmental insistence on the registration of hunting and other privately-owned arms.
            The article quotes Natalie Goldring of the Security Studies Programme in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington:
             ''The arms register has many of the same strengths and weaknesses now as when it was first implemented more than a decade ago.” She then called for the registry to be strengthened, on the grounds that it is still valuable because it is composed of government data.
            However, law-abiding sport shooters and hunters continue to be blamed for the criminal use of arms, but Natalie Goldring is not quoted as going on to point out any means by which the large-scale – read governmental – criminal use of arms is somehow reduced by the existence of the register to which only the law-abiding wish to contribute.