The UN is not trying to take away anyone's guns. Why do the paranoids keep writing these fictional articles as if they were fact???
[url]www.excite.com.au/news/story/aap/20010629/12/international/norway-un-arms-eur.inp[/url]
Guns kill 500,000 people each year: report
12: 33 PM AEST June 29
The 550 million firearms in circulation around the world kill at least half a million people each year,
according to a report presented on Thursday that placed a large part of the blame on industrialised
countries.
Described by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as "weapons of mass destruction in slow motion",
firearms kill about 300,000 people each year in armed conflicts and another 200,000 in
"disorganised violence", according to the report "Small Arms Survey 2001 - Profiling the Problem".
The report, produced by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and the first of its
kind, will be presented at the first UN international conference on small arms to be held July 9-20
in New York.
Some 56 percent of the firearms in circulation belong to private people and are "legal", 44 percent
are in the hands of armed forces and police, while just 0.2 percent are in the hands of "insurgents
and non-state forces."
The number of "illegal" weapons in circulation is not known.
"Ninety states have some capabilities to produce small arms and ammunitions. Between 10 and
20 states account for the overwhelming majority of production and most of them are within the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or Euro-Atlantic area," project director Keith
Krause told a press conference.
Trade and use of firearms -- the two are strictly correlated -- has grown since the mid-1990s as a
result of the break-up of the former Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, Krause said.
Firearms are defined in the publication as handguns, machine guns, submachine guns and assault
rifles such as Kalashnikovs and M-16s.
Krause listed the major producers as the United States, Russia and China, while medium-sized
producers included Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Bulgaria, France, Germany and South Africa.
But, he insisted, legal firearms production was not a lucrative business, estimating it at four to six
billion dollars annually.