DDR Reversal

From ST:

On Tuesday the Vice President, Riek Machar, called for a joint meeting involving national ministers and leadership of the bicameral Juba parliament as well as representatives of the political parties, national unions, business community, local NGOs and civil society organizations in the country.The meeting called for the formation of a wider national mobilization body to coordinate efforts geared towards mobilizing human and material resources to support the national army in the face of the "Khartoum’s aggression.".....This will include recruitment into the army youth volunteers and ex-combatants.

So much for all that effort put into DDR......well, at least UNDDR now has a solid excuse for not having done anything.
Also, how awkward is it going to be to have the soldiers go back out to the villages to return the weapons they took from civilians during the various disarmament campaigns. 


Still, I can't see any possibility of this decision coming back to haunt them in the future.........

Do guns make more violence likely?

From Barking Up the Wrong Tree:

The weapon instrumentality hypothesis suggests that guns contribute to the escalation and lethality of violence. But the relationship between guns and violence might be spurious if the aggressor's violent tendencies or the aggressor's situation-specific intent to harm is the common cause of the presence/use of a gun and the violent outcome. To examine such rival explanations, we draw on interviews with 100 men imprisoned for an aggravated assault or homicide that stemmed from an interpersonal conflict. Each respondent described a matched pair of conflicts: the violent conflict that led to incarceration and a similar nonviolent conflict from the same time period. The matched pair design allows us to control for both potential sources of spuriousness: violent tendencies and situation-specific intent to harm. The results suggest that guns contribute to the violent escalation of conflict, but the impact of guns attenuates substantially after accounting for situation-specific intent to harm.

Source: "Have Gun Will Shoot? Weapon Instrumentality, Intent, and the Violent Escalation of Conflict" from Homicide Studies