Profits, but at what price?

 

CNN reports that the guided bomb that killed 40 schoolboys on a school bus in Yemen on August 9 was manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a U.S. Defense contractor. In the same article, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis noted that the targeting was done by Saudi Arabia, not by the U.S. Apparently, that excuses us as Americans from any responsbility in this tragedy…or does it? This appears to be nothing more than a “guns don’t kill people, people do” NRA-type argument, just applied this time to another nation.

 

I’m not a big fan of firearms, but last summer, I tried out several borrowed guns at a firing range. When I later priced a.380 Smith and Wesson, I was suprised to see that it cost nearly $ 400.00 USD. (That’s more than twice the annual income for a family in Malawi). The gun itself is of a durable plastic but the mechanisms aren’t particularly complex. I can’t imagine that it would cost Smith & Wesson anywhere close to that to manufacture, so there’s likely a big profit with every sale.

Walter Rauschenbush observed: “When fed with money, sin grows wings and claws.” If there’s hefty profit in a single handgun, imagine the profit in a guided bomb like the one that annihiliated the hapless schoolboys in Yemen.

At the end of my work day, I want to know that my labor helped make the world a better place, even if in the smallest of ways. Everyone has to live with their own conscience, but if I were an employee of Lockheed Martin and woke up to gruesome images like those from Yemen, I’d find another job.

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Image credit: By Thomas Quine (Missiles) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons