When finally war came, first to Asia in 1934, to Europe in 1939 and to the US in 1941, it was a global catastrophe. More than fifty million lay dead by its end.
Determined to avoid the isolationism that had engulfed the United States at the end of World War I, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman firmly steered the US into the UN and raised great hopes for its effectiveness. Our diplomats, chastened by our former isolationism, determined that they would never again sit on the sidelines. Having “a seat at the table” became a mantra on Capitol Hill and in the State and Defense departments. Never again would we shut ourselves out.
The legacy of this harsh lesson still carries over. American diplomats instinctively rally to the negotiating table wherever it is, whatever it is about. The rest of the world understands that without American participation, no agreement is worth the paper on which it is written. And the other nations use the treaty-making process primarily as a way to cut the United States down to size. But the addiction of our foreign policy establishment to international conventions, forums, negotiations, and debates ensures our presence at the table and, most likely, our ascension to the global consensus.
But now the time has come for us to be left out; more precisely, to opt out of negotiations that can only lead to a loss of our sovereignty and to the undermining of our democratic system of government. From all sides, we face the pressures of a global community terrified by our power, humbled by our success, and determined to rein us in by ensnaring us in treaties and limitations of all sorts and sizes. What they could never hope to accomplish by military force or by economic power, these nations hope to accomplish by negotiation and treaty. Bluntly, they want to inveigle our gullible diplomats into signing away our country’s rights. As the old saying goes: Uncle Sam has never lost a war nor won a conference.
Now let’s look at each of these treaties in depth. Let’s see how they chip, chip, chip away at our national sovereignty and our democratic self-government.
PART TWO
UN Forces Gun Control on America
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution, granting our citizens the right to bear arms, may be facing de facto repeal in the Arms Trade Treaty now being pushed by the UN.
Have you noticed that President Obama has used his term in office to push every item on the liberal agenda except for gun control? During the 2008 campaign, he spoke of embittered Americans who “cling to their guns,”1 but hasn’t spoken of the issue much since.
Now it’s clear why he hasn’t. He plans to accomplish the liberal agenda of registering, banning, and ultimately confiscating guns through an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT).
At this writing, the treaty’s precise terms have not been unveiled, but its intent is crystal clear: to repeal our Second Amendment and limit or eliminate the right to bear arms in the United States.
(Remember what we said earlier. All international treaties, under the Supremacy Clause of our Constitution, have the force of constitutional law and may not be contradicted by state or federal legislation. The ATT would effectively repeal the Second Amendment as clearly as the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Prohibition amendment—the Eighteenth.)
As with so many of the UN treaties, it advances under false pretenses. The nominal purpose of the ATT is to regulate the international arms trade, limiting the flow of deadly weapons across national borders to drug cartels, criminal gangs, guerillas, and organized crime (just the crowd US Attorney General Eric Holder ran guns to in the Fast and Furious operation). But the catch is that the treaty establishes an international body to promote gun control. It requires that each nation adopt regulations to limit and control export of small arms. It is easy to see how this provision would require registration and inventory of all guns in the United States and could lead to confiscation.
The Independent Sentinel, a publication dedicated to Second Amendment rights, notes that President Obama told Mrs. James Brady—a strong gun control advocate after her husband was shot in the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981—that the administration had not forgotten its commitment to gun control. He told her in May 2011, “I just want you to know that we are working on it. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”2
He was likely referring to the ATT.
In October 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “reversed the policies of previous presidents and stated that she would enter into talks with the international community about signing a small arms treaty.”3 And in May 2010, President Obama signaled America’s willingness to negotiate such a treaty.
Hillary was quick to add that the US will insist on safeguards to protect the individual’s right to bear arms, but other nations are intent on using the treaty to erode them. Debbie Hillier, Oxfam International’s policy adviser (who is working on the treaty), said that “governments must resist US demands to give any single state the power to veto the treaty as this could hold the process hostage during the course of negotiations. We all on all governments to reject such a veto clause.”4
The ATT would “tighten regulation of, and set international standards for, the import, export, and transfer of conventional weapons,” according to the Independent Sentinel. “The treaty they are talking about,” the magazine warns, “basically bans all privately-held semi-automatic weapons.” Semiautomatic weapons should not be confused with machine guns. Machine guns, which are illegal in the United States, permit the rapid firing of bullets with the single pull of a trigger. A semiautomatic weapon features rapid and automatic reloading after each shot, but requires a trigger pull each time the gun is fired. One pull. One shot.
The UN gun control advocates passionately argue that “light weapons and ammunition wreaks havoc everywhere. Mobs terrorizing a neighborhood. Rebels attacking civilians or peacekeepers. Drug lords randomly killing law enforcers or anyone else interfering with their illegal businesses. Bandits hijacking humanitarian aid convoys. In all continents, uncontrolled small arms form a persisting problem.”
The UN continues:
[S]mall arms are cheap, light, and easy to handle, transport and conceal. A build-up of small arms alone may not create the conflicts in which they are used, but their excessive accumulation and wide availability aggravates the tension. The violence becomes more lethal and lasts longer, and a sense of insecurity grows, which in turn lead to a greater demand for weapons.
Most present-day conflicts are fought mainly with small arms, which are broadly used in inter-State conflict. They are the weapons of choice in civil wars and for terrorism, organized crime and gang warfare.5
Of course, why this international trend should empower a UN agency to ban or limit US privately owned weaponry is not clear. Most nations have no right to bear arms and have made private possession illegal. As the horrific toll of international violence makes abundantly clear, these laws are not well enforced.
But, in the United States, murder is a decreasing problem. In 1993, there were 24,530 homicides in the United States.6 Today, despite an increase in population from 250 million to 310 million, the number of homicides has dropped almost in half, to 13,756. Of these, 9,203 involved the use of a firearm.7
With gun violence decreasing sharply, why would we be interested in signing a global gun control treaty? The answer is clear: globalist and left-wing pressure. The liberals say that they want us to be bound by the treaty because the US is the source of 40 percent of the global arms trade.8 But most of that is sold by the government, not by private individuals. The US, Russia, China, Israel, and Germany are the world’s leading arms exporters. But the treaty is aimed at individuals, who account for a small minority of the arms traffic.