Under the Gun: The Small Arms Challenge in the Pacific (review)

It was the kind of thing one might expect in a Schwarzenegger blockbuster, but not in downtown Port Moresby. In December 1999, a gang of gun-toting men hijacked a commercial helicopter and used it to land on the roof of a bank. Armed with military rifles and grenades, they stormed the building in search of the vault (91). The operation failed, and police shot the helicopter down into a busy street, leaving all five men either dead or fatally wounded.

Staggering, first of all, is the sheer audacity of the crime. The incident, after all, took place in broad daylight and was carried out by individuals by the barrel of a gun. What was perhaps even more startling, however, was the police's reckless response. Killings of this nature, where suspects are shot while committing an offence, contribute to an escalating succession of retributive violence. Although the most extreme incident of its kind to date, this event, among others, has sparked talk of a new "gun culture" in the Pacific.

Unlike many press reports on the Pacific's deteriorating law and order problems, which are often keen to deploy anecdote rather than evidence, David Capie's book, Under the Gun: The Small Arms Challenge in the Pacific, carefully deconstructs the rumors and myths surrounding the smallarmstrade that allegedly plagues the region. Capie establishes that, contrary to reports of a thriving interstate gun trade, the Pacific is "uniquely vulnerable to the threats posed by small numbers of uncontrolled firearms" (121).

Capie's plan in the book is simple and straightforward. His study is divided into seven parts, which look, in turn, at various assertions made about the small arms challenge in the Pacific: that legislation and enforcement capacity are critical indicators of instances where societies will be more susceptible to gun violence; that an extensive licit and illicit trade exists in the region; that increasingly pronounced law and order problems in the Pacific are due to the proliferation of illegal weapons within states; that guns are sourced from either military and police armories or surplus World War II supplies. Each of these claims is then calmly held up to the evidence and shown to be either correct or misleading. A set of conclusions and policy recommendations follow, with useful appendixes that list military and police weapons inventories and US arms exports to the Pacific.

Balanced, compelling, and thorough in its use of available evidence, this book offers much to help policy makers in their initial efforts to deal with the problem. They do, however, require a better understanding of the situation at a local level before invoking disarmament schemes, such as those suggested briefly on page 115 (disarmament and demobilization strategies, including "weapons for development" programs).

As you might expect, given the book's genesis as a report commissioned by the New Zealand Public AdvisoryCommitteeon Disarmament and Arms Control, Capie depicts a well-presented and thoroughly researched portrait of some of the challenges posed by small arms trafficking in the Pacific. Capie chooses tofocus in most explicit detail on the four countries whose "histories of problems with firearms, violent crime and conflict and political instability" are more pronounced: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu (18).

In chapter 1, Capie's useful cross-national comparison of small arms legislation proves an informative resource for academics and policy makers. The book's concluding pages importantly stress that "even 'perfect' laws would not address all the challenges presented by firearms in the Pacific" (117).

In chapter 3, Capie attempts to deal with the "wildly contradictory accounts about the scale and sophistication of weapons trafficking in parts of the Pacific" (76). He deduces that most illicit high-powered weapons in circulation are sourced domestically, which should not, however, encourage complacency, because "just a few dozen weapons" can have a hugely...