GUNS, A BETTER INVESTMENT THAN GOLD? “This is the pattern I saw at work in Yugoslavia and the Caucasus twenty years ago as ethnic groups geared up to butcher their neighbors and drive them from their homes; I will never forget the night a Georgian poet asked me how much guns cost on the Istanbul black market; he was arming himself against what he called the ‘Abkhazian menace.’ I made a note to myself at that time: when poets buy guns, tourist season is over. They are buying them now in Damascus; something wicked this way comes.”