NEW YORK — On Monday, March 25, the permanent mission to the United Nations from Mexico sponsored a press event where representatives of four major non-governmental organizations (NGOs) made statements on the progress of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) negotiations currently underway in New York.
The four speakers — representing Oxfam, the World Council of Churches, Amnesty International, and Control Arms — lamented the fact that the current version of the gun control treaty is too weak to be effective.
“This treaty is not good enough,” said Anna MacDonald of Oxfam. “This is not the treaty that is going to save lives and protect people.”
Decrying the “loopholes,” “weaknesses,” and “deficiencies” of the proposal, the groups called for increased regulation and more robust enforcement provisions.
At one point, departing from the globalist party line which promises that the treaty will not affect domestic gun laws, MacDonald warned that the ATT could only save the world from violence if it is made more stringent and is “consistently enforced across state borders.”
Among the many complaints registered by these human rights groups, the one most often mentioned Monday was the draft proposal’s failure to clamp down on the sale, trade, and transfer of ammunition.
As I’ve written early in this series of reports from the UN, nearly every nation participating in the negotiations advocates a more robust treaty, one that will include regulations and eventual confiscation of ammunition.
When pressed by reporters to name the state parties responsible for the treaty’s lack of substantial anti-ammo provisions, MacDonald named the United States.
Secretary of State John Kerry, however, issued a statement just prior to the opening of the latest attempt to hammer out an arms trade agreement announcing that the U.S. was “steadfast in its commitment to achieve a strong and effective Arms Trade Treaty that helps address the adverse effects of the international arms trade on global peace and stability.”
There is also the irrefutable fact that there would be no conference right now were it not for the fact that the Obama administration’s previously filed objections to the treaty mysteriously disappeared after the president won reelection in November.
Within hours, in fact, of locking up another four years in the White House, President Obama ordered the U.S. diplomats to vote in favor of another round of negotiations and to green light the globalist gun grab.
Ironically, then, without the support of the United States there would be no treaty to debate, but it is the United States that is accused of being the roadblock that is standing in the way of accelerating toward civilian disarmament.
Unlike in most sessions of this conference, not only was the United States identified as the chief culprit in the robbery of peace and happiness from the world’s women and children, but the specific provision in the Constitution that inspires this evil was named, as well.
When asked by this reporter how he answers the criticism by gun rights advocates in the United States that the Arms Trade Treaty infringes on the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, World Council of Churches programme executive Jonathan Frerichs said that such a notion was a “bizarre interpretation of the Second Amendment.”
“The [Arms Trade Treaty] does not impact the Second Amendment,” said Anna MacDonald, adding that any statements to the contrary were “lies and misinformation.”
Frerichs, evidently fired up by the opportunity to vent about the American fascination with civilian gun ownership, denounced the “paranoia” of the gun lobby for “holding the world hostage” to violence by demanding that the Second Amendment be held inviolate.
After the press conference, this reporter asked a man identifying himself as a member of Control Arms why, if his organization and others were serious about drafting a treaty that would answer the objections of Second Amendment advocates, they didn’t just include a provision explicitly forbidding any diminution of that right and declaring that it was a person’s unqualified right to keep and bear arms. The response?
“Because we don’t believe that is a right.”
And therein lies the rub: The internationalists do not believe that an individual has the right to keep and bear arms. The internationalists do not believe that that right — or any other right — was given to man by God. The internationalists believe that the slate of UN-approved “human rights” are subject to negotiation and revocation at the will of government.
It is clear from nearly every statement made during the first five days of the Arms Trade Treaty conference that the United Nations is not content to confine itself to ending violence through regulation of the trade in arms. Its principal aim is to enact a globally enforceable scheme whereby all firearms — from handgun to intercontinental missile — all ammunition, and all parts and components of weapons and ammunition, are kept out of the hands of individuals and under the closely regulated and absolute control of the United Nations or one of its approved “state parties.”
National governments are to be converted via this treaty and myriad others already passed and yet to be passed into nothing more than bureaucratic administrative units of the global government-in-waiting.
And, although the U.S. delegation seems to be playing the role of spoiler, the very presence of American diplomats at a conference whose goal is anathema to one of this nation’s most fundamental liberties is reprehensible. The fact that the U.S. delegation sits and listens as other nations insult our way of life and our “bizarre” belief that man is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights, including the right to defend oneself from being deprived of life, liberty, and property, is an insult to the men and women who have given their lives to secure these rights.
Given the nearly constant call for the United States to relent and allow the tinhorn dictators of the world to dictate terms of disarmament to this Republic, our president should immediately recall these negotiators and demand that the teeming nest of hornets buzzing around Turtle Bay be fumigated and relocated to some other country where devotion to a person’s right to keep and bear arms won’t be such a nuisance.
This will not happen, however. Despite their pantomime of commitment to preserving the Second Amendment, President Obama and Secretary Kerry are inveterate internationalists committed rather to the slow and steady surrender of U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations and to securing the world body’s monopoly over all means of armed resistance to its efforts to enslave the world.
American interests would be better served if U.S. diplomats at the Arms Trade Treaty looked less to Barack Obama and John Kerry for guidance and more to Joseph Story’s commentary on the purpose of the Constitution’s protection of the people’s right to keep and bear arms. In 1833, Story wrote:
The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.
Our ability to resist and ultimately triumph over arbitrary power is being threatened this week at the United Nations. If the Arms Trade Treaty passes and the American people are threatened with imprisonment should they refuse to first register and then relinquish their guns, the would-be despots at the UN will have triumphed and the palladium of liberty will be demolished.
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and is currently on assignment in New York to cover the Arms Trade Treaty conference. He can be reached at [email protected].
Related articles:
Gun Control Group Calls for Strict Control of Arms, Ammo in UN Treaty
Senate Votes to Keep U.S. Out of UN Arms Trade Treaty
UN Arms Trade Treaty: National Lists of Gun Owners; Ammunition Regulation
UN Arms Trade Treaty, Day Two: Focus Is Transfer, Registry of Firearms
UN Arms Trade Conference Begins, Sec. General Calls for “Robust” Treaty
