cuchulainn
Member
I'm not a cop, but I play one on T.V. ... 
from the Telegraph
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/...xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/04/30/ixopinion.html
from the Telegraph
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/...xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/04/30/ixopinion.html
Why do TV cops never get to chase gun traffickers?
By Helen Mirren
(Filed: 30/04/2003)
After spending much of the past 10 years playing a law enforcement officer, I am struck by how rarely drama programmes put gun traffickers in the dock. Plenty of drug traffickers have been put behind fictional bars, but no weapons merchants - despite the fact that half a million people a year worldwide lose their lives to guns.
In England and Wales last year, there were 9,974 incidents involving firearms, most of these guns reaching the wrong hands through illegal supply routes.
Why hasn't DI Tennison yet dealt with one of them? Scriptwriters are only mirroring the low priority given to gun trafficking in the real world.
The good news is that, at long last, the Government is going to introduce a law to control arms brokers operating in Britain. The bad news is that the law in its present form will allow business to continue as usual for gun-runners who go abroad to conduct deals.
The world of arms brokers and transporters exists on the fringes of legality, largely uncontrolled and unregulated. Sitting in a Paris café, a British broker will legally be able to organise weapons shipments that will fuel many of the world's major wars, and arrange deliveries to countless other countries suffering from high levels of gun violence.
And, as for arms shippers, who transport the guns across the world, there are so few controls that no one knows who is flying what where. Gun-runners can take off from Europe, disappear from the radar over the Sahara and drop guns into conflict-riven countries, such as Liberia and the Congo, without being detected.
The vast majority of the victims are innocent civilians. I've been to Africa with Oxfam and have seen the results of the gun trade. I have met children who have seen their parents shot dead in front of them. I've visited schools where blood stains the floor after a shooting from the day before. The stories of the innocent men, women and children caught in the crossfire are harrowing. Why is this allowed to happen?
Today, the month-long British gun amnesty comes to an end and thousands of guns will have been taken off our streets.
David Blunkett was right to say: "Gun crime blights our society; it can ruin lives - especially young lives - and tear apart communities." I applaud his stance, and what appears to be his resolute commitment to getting guns off our streets. Every gun that has been handed in will have made our country safer, and mean fewer innocent people are killed.
Mr Blunkett also said: "I have made it clear that the Government will not sit back and allow a small minority of misguided individuals to spread fear and violence in their communities." These are admirable words - but they describe exactly what the Government will allow to happen overseas. While we are desperately trying to get rid of our guns, British citizens will be selling them to other countries.
The Government has said it's too difficult to regulate these individuals plying their trade. But it has applied regulations in similar areas.
Faced with the problem of sex tourism, the Government recognised it had to stop exporting this ugly business to places with weaker controls. So it introduced a law enabling these criminals to be tried wherever they committed the crime. The same is true of bribery and corruption. Why not arms trafficking?
Government representatives have argued that they cannot find the resources to pursue those trafficking arms overseas.
Strange - there seems to be no difficulty in finding the money to subsidise defence export promotion, whether through the activities of embassy defence attachés, who cost an estimated £8 million to £16 million a year, or through the Defence Export Services Organisation - officially part of the Ministry of Defence - which is dedicated to helping manufacturers to sell to foreign markets. This organisation costs the taxpayer an additional estimated £16 million to £21 million a year.
And then there are export credit guarantees – where the Government underwrites defence contracts in case a customer fails to pay the bill. This can lead to consequences that would be comical if they were not so deadly.
During the first Gulf war, British troops faced UK-supplied weapons for which the British taxpayer picked up the unpaid bill to the tune of £700 million. Compared with these costs, the extra personnel needed to run a system controlling brokers overseas pales into insignificance.
Not all resources need be new: why not make better use of existing ones? The Government already invests time and money in international police co-operation to track down drug and people traffickers; why can't it use the same channels to track those who traffic in guns?
The trafficking of arms, for personal profit, to regimes or groups where they are likely to be used for repression or for committing human rights abuses, is morally unacceptable. The Government should be seeking to control British citizens who engage in such activities, wherever in the world the deal is signed. If it is wrong to do it in Britain, it is just as wrong to do it in Calais or anywhere else.
The regulation of arms transporters is crucial. Arms flights should need official clearance and be logged so that we know what weapons are being moved around the globe. Simple information-gathering would help detect the illegal flights and deal with the worst of the problem.
The Government has promised to crack down on these gun-runners. In its 2001 election manifesto, it pledged to control brokers "wherever they are located". It is time the Government kept its promise. Now is the time to end the gun-runners' careers before their deliveries kill another innocent man, woman or child. Then, at last, the gun-runners will be covered by our law. I know DI Tennison would love to get her teeth into them.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.