Gun ownership said to parallel city security

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GENEVA — Last week, professor Keith Krause, program director of the Small Arms Survey at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, discussed the findings of the Small Arms Survey 2007: Guns and the City with The Washington Times reporter John Zarocostas. The annual report on global small-arms violence is funded by United States, European governments and the United Nations.

Question: The survey shows a worldwide increase of civilians holding small arms. You estimate that 650 million small arms, 75 percent of the total 875 million worldwide, are owned by civilians. What's behind this?

Answer: I think there's lots of reasons, but the main one is generally increasing wealth in some parts of the world that make people able to buy weapons and, frankly, the failure of many states to provide for the security of individuals and their communities, which leads to raising insecurity in urban zones, especially in some parts of Africa and Latin America.

Q: Does carrying a gun convey a false sense of security?

A: Certainly the research shows that holding a gun does not make you safer. But you can understand the reasons that will lead people to try to ensure their protection when there's no police force or when there's nothing else to provide for security of their communities or of their families and their property. But it's clear in many parts of Africa and Latin America, where guns have flooded in the communities, the community as a whole is often less secure because the overall rates of violence have gone up and the intensity of the violence has gone up in some places.

Q: The report records staggering figures for Brazil with 45,000 murders.

A: That figure is the murders overall. Not all are attributed to firearms. The vast majority are [due to] firearms in Brazil, and they're concentrated both geographically and within particular cities and parts of the country. That raises some difficult questions about how you tackle a problem that is not national in scope but really is concentrated in the border areas, in the favelas of the big cities and in some areas where there's drug trafficking in gangs and all sorts of other illicit commerce going on.

Q: Why the strong correlation between the increase in the size of cities, especially mega-cities, and increased numbers of armed homicides?

A: We wanted to highlight there's a shift happening because historically, cities were safer places than the countryside. They were better policed, they were easier to manage, and there were social controls. But with the rise of these mega-cities that have eight, ten, twenty million people, many of whom are living in shantytowns that we wouldn't recognize as cities, this is a very new dynamic and it creates zones of insecurity — no-go zones where the police don't even travel into cities — and it creates the conditions that can give rise to a lot of violence, not everywhere, but in a lot of cities.