US gunners target Dhanapala

NEW YORK_ The sign outside a gun store in Connecticut tells it all: "We sell guns to every Dick, Tom and Dirty Harry."

Clint Eastwood, one of Hollywood 's enduring tough guys, played the role of the maverick San Francisco cop "Dirty Harry" in the 1971 crime thriller in which he took the law into his own hands trying to track down a serial killer on the loose.

Described by some critics as a fascist movie, "Dirty Harry" helped Eastwood climb the top of the box office charts.

In one of the final sequences, he gives the killer one last chance as he menacingly aims a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum at him: "This is the most powerful handgun in the world," he warns, "And it will blow your head right off, you punk."

The movie, which did more for the oversized Magnum than any gun show in the United States, is a favourite among rightwing gun lobbyists led by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Last week some of the same gun lobbyists bombarded the United Nations with a flood of hate mail against a UN Conference on Small Arms scheduled to take place from tomorrow to July 20, in New York.

The target of the e-mails was the Department of Disarmament Affairs headed by former Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United States Jayantha Dhanapala, currently the highest ranking Sri Lankan in the UN system.

As Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, he is the UN Secretariat's driving force on global arms control_ and whose primary task is to help curb not only the proliferation of nuclear weapons but also the 500 million small arms currently in circulation.

At a UN media conference last week, he was peppered with questions on the anti-United Nations stand increasingly taken by gun lovers.

But in responding to reporters, he delivered a sobering message to the politically-influential gun lobby in the United States: the upcoming UN conference on small arms, he assured, is no threat to legitimate American gun-owners.

"We are not going to take guns away from them," he said, adding that the world body has no quarrel with the constitutional right of US citizens to bear arms.

"We are looking at small arms in an international context. We are not looking at domestic gun control," he added.

Setting the record straight, he said that there were no explicit threats against any UN officials.

"But they were strongly worded messages. We have handed them over to UN security to make their own assessments."

Dhanapala also said that the conference was not about outlawing the legal manufacture or trade in small arms, nor their legal, private ownership.

The United Nations has argued that each of the UN's 189 member states creates its own internal gun laws, and that the world body has no jurisdiction over any member's state's national legislation

Speaking of the upcoming conference, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told reporters last week that the main goal of the conference is "to try and ensure that we control the trade in illicit arms and that guns do not get into the wrong hands."

Annan pointed out that over the last 20 years or so, "most of the killings in the world, apart from the AIDS epidemic, is being done by small arms."

"We've worried a lot about nuclear disarmament, which is important, and on which we should focus on. But these (small) arms are doing incredible damage in cities, in war-torn areas.""I hope we can get the manufacturers and governments to work with us in controlling the flow of these illicit arms."

A study published by the Oxford University Press last week said the real "weapons of mass destruction" were not nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, but small arms which are causing devasatation and destruction in civil wars and ethnic conflicts worldwide.

The focus of the two week long conference will be the illicit trade in small arms - not the legal trade, manufacture or ownership of weapons.

According to UN figures, the total number of small arms and light weapons currently in circulation is over 500 million.

The United Nations has conservatively estimated that between 40 and 60 percent of illicit arms and light weapons have been diverted from the legal trade.

And of the 49 major conflicts during the 1990s, small arms were the weapons of choice in 46 of them.

Because of their ease of use and widespread availability, small arms have helped create more than 300,000 child soldiers worldwide.

Since 1990, in conflicts where small arms were used, more than two million children have been killed, five million disabled and 12 million left homeless.