Armed Violence Kills 2,000 a day Worldwide

Reuters:

More than 2,000 people around the world are dying from armed violence each day, on average, advocacy groups said on Tuesday, urging nations to launch negotiations on a treaty to regulate the arms trade.

A report by the 12 groups was issued as a U.N. General Assembly committee began considering a draft resolution that would set a timetable for negotiations with the aim of concluding a treaty in 2012.

The report, written for the groups by British-based Oxfam, said that since most governments agreed in 2006 on the need to regulate the global arms trade, an estimated 2.1 million people had died as a direct or indirect result of armed violence.

That worked out at more than 2,000 per day, or more than one every minute -- most of them civilians.

Of the deaths, more than 700,000 resulted from armed conflicts, including those in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Sri Lanka and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the report said. The figures also include people killed in non-political violence involving firearms.

But the violence continues unabated and ignored, especially in Africa:

The Obama administration has injected itself into the crisis in Guinea, taking the unusual step of sending a senior diplomat to protest the mass killings and rapes here last week.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for “appropriate actions” against a military government that she said “cannot remain in power.”

“It was criminality of the greatest degree, and those who committed such acts should not be given any reason to expect that they will escape justice,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters in Washington. She said that the nation’s leader, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, and his government “must turn back to the people the right to choose their own leaders.”