As you've been hearing in the news, Moammar Gadhafi's wife and three of his children have skipped over Libya's border to Algeria. The whereabouts of Gaddafi himself are still unknown. Libya is a country overflowing with weapons. After six months of fighting, almost everyone now has access to a gun. And then there are the stockpiles of conventional and non-conventional weapons that were once under the control of Gaddafi. It's not at all clear who controls those now and there's great worry they could fall into the wrong hands.

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Today's guest host was Piya Chattopadhyay.

Part One of The Current

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It's Tuesday, August 30.

And Ontario's Liberals are promising to bring back doctor house calls if re-elected Oct 6.

Currently, house call services will include telling you how long you'll have to wait for an MRI, informing you how much an ambulance will cost, and apologizing for arriving at your door a year after you phoned.

This is The Current.

Libya Weapons - Lulu Garcia-Navarro

We started this segment with a scene from Libya showing people celebrating the departure of Moammar Gadhafi by raising pistols, rifles, machine guns and firing into the sky. Libya is awash in small arms these days. Automatic rifles, anti-tank rockets and shoulder-fired missiles that once were a part of Ghadafi's arsenal.

The good news is that Moammar Gadhafi agreed to destroy his country's chemical weapons in 2003. In exchange, the international community lifted the sanctions that had been crippling the country. The bad news is that allowed Gadhafi to buy nearly a billion dollars worth of conventional weapons. They're now flooding the country, causing major security concerns not just for Libya -- but the region.
For a sense of the scale of the problem inside Libya, we're joined now by Lulu Garcia-Navarro. She's a reporter with National Public Radio and she was in Tripoli.

Libya Weapons - Matthew Schroeder

There are a lot of weapons floating around Libya right now .... tank rockets, rocket-propelled grenades and perhaps most worryingly, the SAM-7s that reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro mentioned. They're also called Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems - or Manpads.

And they're not just cause for concern in Libya, according to Matthew Schroeder. He is the Director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-DC think tank. Matthew Schroeder was in Washington D.C.

Libya Weapons - Douglas Frantz

This isn't the first time a collapsing regime has left behind big worries about weapons falling into the wrong hands. Douglas Frantz is a former journalist and a former Chief Investigator for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he was responsible for weapons and nuclear proliferation in countries including Libya.

Douglas Frantz is now a Managing Director with Kroll, a global security and investigation firm in Washington.

Related Links:

• Concerns over looting of Libyan weapons, experts less worried about nuclear, chemical stockpiles - Reuters
• U.S. Is Paying European Teams to Hunt Stray Munitions in Libya - The Associated Press

Other segments from today's show:

• It's a Steal (Documentary)