The arms industry is a global business which manufactures weapons and military technology and equipment. It consists of commercial industry involved in research, development, production, and service of military material, equipment and facilities. Arms producing companies, also referred to as defence contractors or military industry, produce arms mainly for the armed forces of states. Departments of government also operate in the arms industry, buying and selling weapons, munitions and other military items. Products include guns, ammunition, missiles, military aircraft, military vehicles, ships, electronic systems, and more. The arms industry also conducts significant research and development.

It is estimated that yearly, over 1.5 trillion dollars are spent on military expenditures worldwide (2.7% of World GDP). This represents a decline from 1990 when military expenditures made up 4% of world GDP. Part of this goes to the procurement of military hardware and services from the military industry. The combined arms sales of the top 100 largest arms producing companies amounted to an estimated $315 billion in 2006. In 2004 over $30 billion were spent in the international arms trade (a figure that excludes domestic sales of arms). The arms trade has also been one of the sectors impacted by the credit crunch, with total deal value in the market halving from US$32.9bn to US$14.3bn in 2008. Many industrialized countries have a domestic arms industry to supply their own military forces. Some countries also have a substantial legal or illegal domestic trade in weapons for use by its citizens. An illegal trade in small arms is prevalent in many countries and regions affected by political instability.

Richard Boyd Barrett (born November 1967) is an Irish politician who is currently a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dún Laoghaire constituency.

Boyd Barrett is a former member of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, and chair of the Irish Anti-War Movement and on multiple occasions has been cited on war issues in the Irish media. He opposes the Iraq War and helped mobilise mass popular protests against it in 2003, amid concerns that the war would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Domestically, he has campaigned to reverse job losses, supported the Rossport Five and voiced opposition to Ireland's bank-bail outs and the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) among other issues.

Boyd Barrett was elected to Dáil Éireann in the 2011 general election. He is known for, what the The Irish Times described as, his "consistently passionate outrage and opposition to the Government’s handling of the [financial and banking] crisis."

Adopted as a baby, his natural mother is actress Sinéad Cusack, with whom he was later reunited. This was revealed in the last week of his unsuccessful 2007 Dáil election campaign, during which Cusack, a vocal opponent of the Iraq War, canvassed for him. He was raised in Glenageary by adoptive parents David and Valerie Boyd Barrett, attending St Michael's College. He holds a Master's Degree in English Literature from University College Dublin.

Richard Newell Boyd (b. 19 May 1942, Washington, D.C.; Ph.D. MIT 1970) is an American philosopher who has spent most of his career at Cornell University, though he also taught briefly at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

He is well-known in philosophy of science circles as a philosophical realist and a scientific realist. In moral philosophy circles he is a leading defender of moral realism. His co-edited book The Philosophy of Science (ISBN 0-262-52156-3) is widely used in undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses. He has also made important contributions to the development of Cornell realism, a distinctly naturalistic position in moral philosophy.

Boyd's doctoral thesis, directed by Hilary Putnam, is called "A recursion-theoretic characterization of the ramified analytical hierarchy", and his degree was one of the first Ph.Ds awarded in philosophy by MIT.