Weapons of mass instruction

 

© By Mike Keenan

As the U.S. lobbies for war with Iraq, there are many hollow words routinely repeated by public figures these days. At the top of the list is the ubiquitous weapons of mass destruction, a battle mantra for George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and a force-fed media. What does the phrase really mean?

Examine stats on murders by guns in the United States. Remember those teens that shot up a school in Columbine? Iain Murray in the Christian Science Monitor states that American children are more likely to be killed by guns than children from other western industrialized countries. They are also more likely to be murdered by other means. Elsewhere in the west, the homicide rate for children age 4 and under is less than 1 per 100,000. It's quadruple that in the U.S. at 4.1 per 100,000. For every American child 4 or younger killed by a firearm, more than eight others die violently by other means - blunt objects, strangulation, hands, fists or feet. According to the FBI, in 1997, of 738 children under age 13 murdered in the U.S., 133 were killed by guns.

Last year, both nearby Buffalo and more sophisticated Boston witnessed a 67 percent increase in murder rates. ABC’s Jørgen Wouters says firearms kill 35,000 people every year in the U.S., well ahead of 36 of the world's wealthiest nations in murders, suicides and accidents.

The United States is unique. a recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study says. It has the highest overall firearm mortality rate, a high proportion of homicides that are the result of a firearm injury, and the highest proportion of suicides that result from firearm injury.

People typically associate weapons of mass destruction with the kind of powerful nuclear bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, an estimated 45 000 people perished on the first day and a further 19 000 during the next four months from a total population of 250 000. In Nagasaki, from a population of 174 000, 22 000 died on the first day and thanks to radiation, another 17 000 within four months.

Nuclear weapons may cause incredible destruction but in Africa, you will recall, a few hundred machetes were as effective a weapon in Rwanda’s terrible genocide of 1994 in which an estimated 500,000 minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates were massacred while the west silently observed.

Poverty is another weapon of mass destruction. Third world countries that cannot afford drugs readily available here, witness a daily mass obliteration of large portions of their peoples due to chronic illnesses, epidemics, famine and malnutrition.

Economic embargoes such as that currently meanly imposed by the U.S. against Cuba for 35 long years after the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco, are weapons of mass destruction. If an embargo against Vietnam can be lifted, most favoured nation status extended to nuclear-ready China and negotiations take place with nuclear-capable North Korea, what’s up with Cuba?

We haven’t discussed automobiles or drugs yet. Motor vehicles accidents cause more deaths than all natural disasters combined. In the United States, your chances of being injured in a motor vehicle accident are better than one in a thousand. Males are twice as likely to die as females. Last year, the percentage of alcohol-related traffic fatalities in the U.S. was 40 percent, and the number of people who died in alcohol-related crashes was16, 652.

As it proudly does in so many other areas, the U.S. appears to be the current world leader in weapons of mass destruction once the definition is truly understood. Perhaps, as suggested in Michael Moore’s movie, Bowling for Columbine, it might consider modeling itself more on peace-loving Canada. And speaking of Canada, where are the Mike Pearson successors in government when we really need them?