We talk about this a lot and it's an odd topic.

On the one hand it's great that western countries have the luxury of having so few impacts from wars that many don't even know that the US still has 8,400 military personnel in Afghanistan.

On the other hand it makes the population really not give a shit about issues surrounding formal war or it's personal impacts, so they end up just letting politicians slide on stuff.

Soldiers are between truck drivers and lawyers. More tactile than, and similarly skilled as, most of them. The luxury of the first world is the population's ability to ignore dying soldiers.

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.

Relative, like standing at the side of the road instead of in it. One reason I never talk about stuff like this is ppl who intellectualise rather than show any understanding of emotional response.