Small Arms and Civil Wars

Okay, so I know that I've kind of been on this gun kick recently.  I'll be over it soon.  Sorry.

But in the meantime...

There's sort of this long-running debate in Political Science between people who think that grievances are an important cause of civil wars, and there's another group of people who think that civil wars are all about opportunity--that there are always grievances in any society that are strong enough to cause a civil war, but they only break out when rebellion is likely to be successful.  This is characterized (caricatured?) as the "Greed v. Grievance" debate.

So, I'll go on record here in saying that I think grievances matter, and there are places where grievances are stronger than others, and there are places where there are more grievances than others, and I suspect that will eventually be shown to be associated with civil war outbreak.  Or I could be wrong.  Whatever.

Setting that aside, there's pretty good evidence that factors which lower the cost of rebellion, or increase the rewards to rebellion, are associated with civil war outbreak and duration.  So, where it's easy to start and fight a rebellion because you've got favorable terrain (mountains, jungle), you get more and longer wars.  Also, when you can pay for your rebellion easily because you've got "high value, low weight goods" (cocaine, diamonds, shrunken heads) you get more and longer civil wars.  So, Colombia has the FARC (cocaine, jungle), and Afghanistan has... well... you know, like the whole Afghani population (mountains, opium poppies).

It occurs to me that one of the major costs of an irregular rebellion (a guerilla war) is probably small arms and ammunition.  When we talk about the Viet Cong, or the FARC, or the Afghani Taliban these days, we're not talking about armies with tanks and jets and artillery.  Or uniforms.  Or even very nice clothes, or food, a lot of times.  We're talking about dudes with rifles and rocket propelled grenades, and maybe a mortar or something.

Anyways, if high-value, low weight goods make it more likely that you'll get a civil war because you can buy guns, won't it also be more likely that you'll get a civil war because those guns are cheaper?

If that's true, won't it also be true that you'll get more civil war where you've got more small arms?

So, basically, I'm wondering if civil war is going to be more or less costly in the future, if this dynamic is true.  There are a lot of people making guns these days.  But the truth is, there are probably going to be fewer small arms on the global arms market in the future than there have been for the last fifty years or so.  It's no coincidence that when we think of a guerilla fighter, we think of a guy with an AK rifle.  That's because the Russians and Chinese basically relied on the same grand strategy for defense, which was something along the lines of "if we have more guys with guns, we'll win."  Basically because they knew that, in terms of population, there aren't too many other places that could compete with them.

And of course, everybody else knew that too.  So the US didn't have an enormous standing army like the Russians did.  Instead, we made lots of nuclear weapons and other sophisticated technology.

Anyways, a lot of those AK rifles have been banging around out there in the mountains and jungle for a long time now.  Some of them, like 65 years.  And those rifles are pretty tough, but they're getting old.  And a lot of them are wearing out, and don't work very well anymore.  As time goes on, that's going to be the case more and more.  Because the Chinese and the Russians no longer are keeping up the huge ground armies they once were, and they're not making as many guns as they were, I think.

Or am I wrong?  Are there more rather than less guns out there these days?  Or is this whole idea silly?