Guns go home with the soldiers, but landmines are designed to kill - mindlessly, out of control, for years.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Landmines are different from other conventional weapons. When a war is over, the landmines stay in the ground and continue to kill - for decades.
The landmine is eternally prepared to take victims. In common parlance, it is the perfect soldier, the 'eternal sentry.' The war ends, the landmine goes on killing.
Even soldiers from the Vietnam War had said that when they were fighting in that war, the landmine was just one of any number of weapons to use in the fighting. It wasn't until they began to think about the aftermath and the legacy of landmines that they recognized the long-term, indiscriminate impact of the weapon.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
Do you know that every day, 10 people in Afghanistan are injured by landmines? It will continue for the next 50 years, because the country has the largest number of landmines in the world.
The question in their minds was, why did the outside world, and particularly the Western world, produce all these landmines, and send them to Afghanistan? This business must be stopped. It's a dirty business to produce such a horrible device.
Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior.
Guns do kill. Unlike cars, that is all they do.
The knee-jerk approach of those who want to control firearms may not be the solution.
Landmines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian - a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal.