From Investor’s Business Daily, July 9, 2012
The United Nations is putting the finishing touches on an Arms Trade Treaty that transcends borders and may even trample our Constitutional right to bear arms. Every indication is that the president will sign it.
Like the New Start and Law of the Sea treaties before it, as well as the Kyoto Protocol and Agenda 21, the Arms Trade Treaty being finalized at the U.N. this month is one of those feel-good, can’t-we-all-get-along pieces of parchment whose net effect is to accomplish little except to eat away at American sovereignty and freedom.
Just as the world’s worst human rights violators sat on and often chaired the U.N. Human Rights Council, Iran, arms supplier extraordinaire to America’s enemies, was elected on Saturday to a top position on the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty being held in New York. It began July 2 and extends through July 27.
This came right after the same U.N. found Iran guilty of illegally transferring guns and bombs to the murderous Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, currently slaughtering thousands of its own citizens as an impotent U.N. joins the U.S. administration in standing around and watching.
The mindset of the one-worlders preaches that guns cause crime and war and if we only get rid of those otherwise inanimate objects the evil that lurks in the hearts and minds of men will suddenly dissipate. Then we can buy the world a soft drink and sing “Kumbaya.”
We are assured by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who enthusiastically backs the treaty, that it only deals with international trade and trafficking and does not affect our Second Amendment rights. How the treaty would have dealt with Operation Fast and Furious, the administration program that walked guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, she does not say.
We don’t believe such assurances, given by an administration that has shown no respect for the U.S. Constitution and has a robust gun-control agenda of which Fast and Furious may have been a part. Its expansive view of its powers, recently ratified by a bizarre Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare, is supported by judges at all levels increasingly willing to incorporate international precedent and law in their decisions.
The treaty, which former Clinton adviser and political pundit Dick Morris believes President Obama will sign soon after it is completed, would seem to cover guns and weapons in the warm, live hands of private American citizens.
Last week, 125 members of Congress sent a letter to President Obama and Secretary Clinton warning that the treaty is “likely to pose significant threats to our national security, foreign policy and economic interests as well as our constitutional rights.”
A paper by the U.N.’s Coordinating Action on Small Arms (CASA) notes that arms have been “misused by lawful owners” and says that the “arms trade therefore be regulated in ways that would … minimize the misuse of legally owned weapons.” Is defending your home against intruders a “misuse”?
Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference last February, National Rifle Association Vice President Wayne LaPierre accused Obama of working behind the scenes with the U.N. on a “treaty that could effectively ban or severely restrict civilian ownership of firearms worldwide.”
The treaty also establishes a bizarre moral equivalence between countries that trade arms to defend freedom and those that do so to suppress and extinguish it. Would such a treaty allow us to sell weapons to Taiwan or Israel?
Private ownership of firearms is a cornerstone of American liberty. If the people in places like Sudan and Syria had gun rights protected by their government and courts, would they be oppressed and slaughtered? We think not.
Let’s protect our Second Amendment rights and not jeopardize them with a vague and misguided treaty.
