Guns and Ammo

Thomas Morton goes to Albuquerque to check out the new face of school security, and Shane Smith travels to old battlefields of Iraq to see what the ongoing cost of war is when the shooting finally stops.

After the bloodbath in Newtown Connecticut the unceasing debate over gun control in United States reached a highly agitated state. Both sides think they're categorically right and no one is willing to see the middle ground.

Since one of the most intense battles is over whether equipping the teachers with weapons will make schools safer, Thomas went to a school where they actually practice that. Lillie Allen is the principal of New Life Baptist Academy, a church school in Albuquerque with 250 students, 20 teachers, and at least 5 loaded firearms distributed among them.

So every pupil at New Life, from the youngest all the way up to seniors, are involved in active marksman training. It's mostly basic drill, just instead of preparing for a disaster; they're getting prepared for an armed lunatic coming into their doors.

The problem with armed conflict is, it's always far worse than we assume it's going to be. It's not manly bullet grazes and bruises; it's rather permanent disabilities and death. And sometimes the repercussions of war are even worse.

One of the first ways that Iraqi found out about their country's after-war environmental disaster was that lot of people were coming into the hospitals with radiation contamination. At first doctors didn't know why, but soon concluded that they were all scrappers. They were collecting parts from trucks, tanks and helicopters, and all the obsolete scrap that had been bombarded during the war, and then they found out that all of this junk is actually radioactive.

Now of course we are all aware that war is awful. But we don't know just how awful until it's over. Because the weapons used in modern armed conflict have horrible and lasting effects, long after the bloodshed has stopped