A World Drowning in Guns

Abstract

I come to New York to talk about a familiar subject: gun control. But let me warn you: this may be a different kind of gun control lecture than you have heard before. It will not be about gun control in the streets of Manhattan or Columbine, or the Brady Bill, or gun registration, or even the Second Amendment, at least not until the lecture's end. What I want to talk about is gun control in such cities as Freetown, Sierra Leone; Pristina, Kosovo; Medellin, Colombia; Kabul, Afghanistan; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Mogadishu, Somalia-all places that consumed my attention during my tenure as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.