GUNS

There are currently roughly 875 million guns in the world, with about 8 million more being produced each year. According to Oxfam, 12 billion bullets are also produced each year, which is nearly two bullets for every person in the world. The destruction these tools have inflicted on humanity is almost without measure. Philip Jones Griffiths observed first hand the effect of guns, not just on the bodies their bullets hit, but on societies and culture in general. Philip can be heard in this Magnum in Motion video from 2008 discussing his impressions and experiences of these tools of destruction. The piece was originally titled ‘Point and Shoot’.

“It’s not like the movies, they’re not little round holes, they blow bits of bodies away.”

Philip Jones Griffiths

The death toll from small arms dwarfs that of all other weapons systems — and in most years greatly exceeds the toll of the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In terms of the carnage they cause, small arms, indeed, could well be described as ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, March 2000