Word: guns
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...looks more like a sack of potatoes than anything else - the coarsely woven brown bag the skinny Thai corporal is hefting onto the rickety table with a grunt. The sack gapes open and dozens of guns clank out, covering the tabletop, several dropping onto the grimy concrete floor. We stare at the jumbled heap of handguns, which I know from Joe, the arms trader who has brought me, are either Brownings or Smith & Wessons. Some have seen long service, the butts chipped and scored. Joe ignores these, instead picking up a snub-nosed Browning, still shiny with gun...
...speaking to the colonel who is selling him the guns. The colonel glares at me. I know he doesn't believe that I'm a friend of Joe's from across the border in Malaysia who needs a gun for protection. He starts to shout in Thai. Joe nods politely, putting to one side the 10 weapons he has selected. Smiling all the time, carefully avoiding eye contact with the colonel, Joe reaches into a waist pack and counts out a thick wad of Malaysian currency. "I won't bring her again, I promise. Here, this is 11,000 ringgit...
...Gun trafficking feeds the tide of violence that blights the region, threatens democracy and development, and destroys lives. But despite all that, there are few signs that it will be stopped, or even slowed. It's too lucrative for too many people. Take Thailand, for example. "After the collapse of military dictatorship in 1973," says Sungsidh Pirayarangsan, a professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and a specialist on the issue, "local godfathers, drug traffickers, traders of war weapons and others involved in illegal trade laundered themselves through the election process. Today, the contraband arms trade is able to survive because...
...level up from buyers like Samnang are the brokers who collect large orders from buyers and arrange for the gun shipments. Chay, a broker in his early 30s, seems nervous when we meet just after dawn in the urine-redolent upper room of a bar 15 minutes outside Bangkok. A heavily built Thai, Chay fidgets a lot, looking down at his hands. His discomfort may be caused by his boss who is sitting at another table, an obese, balding man in his 50s who scowls behind thick, gold-rimmed glasses and cigar smoke...
...have anything to do with the man waving a pistol outside the White House, the one the Secret Service shot in the knee? That was sweet shooting, by the way, only slightly more hurtful than the kind Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys, used to do to knock a gun out of the bad guy's hand - immaculate gunplay. Alas, I see that Roy's wife, Dale Evans, has died, having survived into an age of movies that by digital magic turn each screen death into the gaudiest, bloodiest horror...