“The US Commerce Department has played booster and concierge to the firearm industry, even as America’s mass shootings horrify the world and gun-crime rates rise in many of the importing countries.”
Original article is a Bloomberg piece available at - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-us-made-gun-exports-shootings-violence-sig-sauer/
I think anyone who thinks greater access to tools of death and destruction is a net positive is deluding themselves.
It may be net neutral, in that giving people weapons to “counter” other weapons negates other weapons… but it doesn’t protect them, it just gives them a chance to hurt others as much as they’re hurt themselves.
It’s predicated on the idea of mutually assured destruction, but in not so nearly a potent manner as nuclear arms… which, in and of themselves, are not a universally potent enough deterrent to prevent war. Just enough that those weapons themselves aren’t used (more than twice). People still get hurt and killed by guns. And as any defender of gun death statistics will tell you, more often by the people who own them.
If you consider that a net positive… well, I kind of feel sorry for you.