Weapon+Trafficking

I picked the topic of Weapon Trafficking because I feel it is an issue the United Nations can (and very well might) monitor.

I started out with the question of, does the UN really understand the scope of this problem? My history teacher often tells me that while 70,000 people died in the Sichuan earthquake last year, 60,000 people die each //month// from smoking related illnesses in China. However, the amount of press coverage an earthquake receives is much more than the amount that a trivial matter such as smoking does. Now my issue wasn't smoking but I was wondering if these to things were like an analogy. The first article I found was []. Not only did it confirm my earlier suspicions with the quote "The problem remains grave. In a world awash with small arms, a quarter of the estimated $4 billion annual global gun trade is believed to be illicit. Small arms are easy to buy, easy to use, easy to transport and easy to conceal. Their continued proliferation exacerbates conflict, sparks refugee flows, undermines the rule of law and spawns a culture of violence and impunity.", but it also made me curious to see if countries were trying by themselves to end this problem. That's when I found a short blurb about Samoa and how it is searching fishing boats for guns and drugs, which I assume go hand in hand in the trafficking business, after a TV documentary on the subject.  []

Why is the UN worried about nuclear weapons that will never be fired instead of small arms, which are fired every day. The amount of casualties inflicted by nuclear weapons have killed pale in comparison to that of your everyday, run-of-the-mill handgun. The question is, how should the UN reduce the number of deaths? Well common sense says that if a person buys a gun illegally, he or she doesn't want to keep it in a safe. How did the Somali pirates acquire their weapons? What about the drug cartels in Mexico? They didn't go to your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart and buy it. So a good start would be to see if tightening up on illegal trade would help the figures. If we can't stop this problem completely because of different National laws, we can at least stop the international bad guys from wreaking their harm. What is a drug gang without guns, or a terrorism organization without some sort of weapons? I can't wait to further reasearch this over the summer, and I think I will actually see news events in a new light after studying this, as will many delegates. Although maybe I should use Arms Trafficking as my title, as it includes more of the issue.