OPINION
When there is a tragic shooting in the U.S., like the horror in Texas last week, we non-Americans from so called-liberal countries find ourselves bemused by the fact that in the U.S., a potentially homicidal maniac can so easily buy an automatic weapon.
The fact that anyone can buy guns — just as long as they present a driver's licence and are not actually foaming at the mouth or having a seizure of some kind — is astonishing to us.
Self-satisfied, we murmur that in our countries (Europe or SA, for instance) this would never ever be allowed...
It is obviously ludicrous.
Why then do we fail to summon similar outrage about the fact that potentially genocidal dictators can easily buy a shipload of automatic weapons from European governments (with an assortment of chemical weapons thrown in) with exactly the same ease?
Even if they are foaming at the mouth and having some kind of rage-related seizure...
This, too, is obviously ludicrous.
The London Review of Books reports that "almost half of British arms exports go to Saudi Arabia, up fivefold since the kingdom intervened in Yemen's civil war. British bombs are being dropped by British planes maintained by British personnel over one of the world's poorest countries".
Probably more than half of the weapons being used in the destruction of Syria are supplied by European countries.
Germany has happily sold aircraft to the Burmese military, which has so openly and ruthlessly oppressed the Rohingya minority.
The fourth-, fifth-, sixth-, seventh- and eighth-biggest arms exporters on earth are France, Germany, the U.K., Spain and Italy — all EU countries.
South Africa itself has an active arms industry, and has supplied weapons that countries including Chad, Rwanda, Sudan and Guinea have used against their own populations.
Because hot on the heels of the E.U. "liberals", the 22nd-biggest arms exporter in the world is... South Africa.