ABSTRACT
Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was probably the first (but certainly not the last) to describe small arms as ‘weapons of mass destruction… in slow motion’. 2 And, often, as the statistics prove, the motion isn't even particularly slow. In what has been described as a landmark study, the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development concluded that, each year, at least 526,000 people die from armed violence, mostly involving small arms (GD Secretariat, 2011). 3 This equates to more than 1,440 deaths every day.
