The major ongoing conflicts within The Middle East, Africa, and South America are as brutal as they are because of small arms and associated trade... specifically the communism-driven over-abundance of AK-47s
Why do you think they are any more brutal with AK-47s than they would be without small arms? We don't have a control group, but let's try to construct some comparisons.
All of the regions you mention have a long and storied history of brutal conquest and warfare that predate the invention of small arms. This is evidence against small arms being a causal factor.
The vast majority of the regime-caused deaths of the last hundred years are from starvation, not from combat. Again, evidence that small arms are not a prerequisite for mass suffering.
The country with the highest small arms concentration in the world by a factor of 50% is the US, which is also one of the richest countries in the world by any metric. This is evidence against small arms proliferation being a sufficient condition for conflict.
So while it's possible that small arms made the pre-existing conflicts in these regions worse, I don't see any strong evidence for it. If you take the Geneva perspective on things, it's a lot more humane to get shot than to e.g. die from an infected spear wound, so one can imagine how this modernization of warfare might even make it marginally less terrible. If you have any data that suggests that small arms definitively make these conflicts worse, I would like to hear it.
I'm talking about an entire book that provides a strong argument. Want me to read it to you? Maybe I should paste the entire contents here, would that be easier for you?
