“Progressives” Cheer UN’s Gun Control Christmas Present

Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

You might have missed the news in the holiday rush: The United Nations chose Christmas Eve to usher in its Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the UN’s main assault on the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. Although most Americans, including even most American gun owners who staunchly support the Second Amendment, are unaware of these recent developments, the “progressives” of the militant gun control lobby are exulting over this achievement that they have relentlessly pursued for more than a decade. As The New American reported on November 8, the UN’ Arms Trade Treaty, which has been packaged as a measure to combat terrorists, bandits, and warlords, was scheduled to go into effect on December 24.

“The world got a present on Christmas Eve, when an international treaty to limit the sale of weapons to warlords and terrorists went into effect,” Dennis Jett, professor of international affairs at Penn State University, jubilantly reported in a December 26 essay for the liberal-left New Republic.

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“The entry into force today of the Arms Trade Treaty, adopted in April 2013 by the UN General Assembly, is a landmark in the international security agenda,” declared Federica Mogherini, vice president of the European Commission and high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs, on December 24.

“The EU has been an active supporter of the principles of greater responsibility and transparency in arms trade enshrined in the Treaty,” Mogherini noted. “The Treaty now needs to gain universal applicability in order to be truly effective,” she continued. “It also needs to be fully implemented.… All EU Member States have signed the Treaty and all ratifications will be completed shortly. I want to reaffirm the strong commitment of the EU to actively engage in the preparation for the first Conference of States Parties which will take place next year.”

Over at Foreign Affairs, the very influential journal of the world-government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations, Denise Garcia wrote, on December 23, “The United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which comes into force on Christmas Eve this year, will deal a major blow to illegal arms dealers that supply the weapons for a large portion of the world’s conflicts.”

As with other ATT advocates anxious to secure U.S. Senate approval, Garcia asserts that the UN treaty presents absolutely no threat whatsoever to Americans’ gun rights, as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. “The ATT does not contain a single provision that regulates the possession of civilian arms and clearly limits its scope to international trade,” the CFR writer insists. “During treaty negotiations, the United States carefully eliminated any elements that might conflict with its domestic gun laws.”

It would be more accurate to say that during negotiations, the U.S. negotiators, under the direction of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then Secretary of State John Kerry (both rabidly opposed to civilian gun ownership), crafted wording to camouflage some of the most obvious attacks on civilian access to arms and ammunition.

As The New American has pointed out repeatedly (see here, and here), the text of the ATT is itself problematic; but an even greater danger emanates from the many organizations, individuals, and governments that have been behind the pact from the beginning, and can be counted on to use it to gradually enact and enforce increasingly coercive and restrictive measures against individual firearms ownership.

Are such concerns merely the paranoid imaginings of “gun nuts”? Hardly. The main coalition tasked with creating the appearance of popular support for the UN’s ATT is the Control Arms Campaign, an international rent-a-mob made up of virulent gun control groups financed by the socialist governments of Europe (many of which are ruled by parties that are members of the radical Socialist International), the big tax-exempt foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Gates, et al), and numerous agencies of the EU and UN.

Among the leading actors of the Control Arms Campaign are the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (formerly known as Handgun Control, Inc., or HCI), the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), Oxfam International, and Amnesty International. Spokesmen for these and other Control Arms Campaign member organizations have publicly called for outright bans and/or draconian restrictions on private gun ownership.

In a column last year, we reported on a number of recent statements by gun ban advocates detailing, in their own words, their plans for incrementally effecting a de facto gun ban, by piecemeal enactment of costly and increasingly restrictive controls on ammunition, private sales and transfers, firearms parts, registration, etc.

In the U.S. Senate, we have extreme anti-gun fanatics such as Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has called for an outright ban on all firearms. As she told CBS’s 60 Minutes following her victory on enacting the federal “assault weapons” ban, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them — ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in,’ I would have done it.”

(See the 60 Minutes video of Sen. Feinstein’s astonishing attack on the Constitution here.)

Many conservatives are taking comfort in the fact that in 2013, 50 U.S. senators signed a letter to President Obama expressing their strong disapproval to his decision to unilaterally sign the ATT without Senate support, and warning that they would oppose the ATT. This would seem to deny the president the two-thirds Senate majority he needs to ratify the treaty. However, while the Senate letter and various statements by individual senators are encouraging, no one should underestimate the potential for senatorial flip-flopping on this issue, once the pressure is turned up.

As we noted in the video commentary below, every senator must be put on notice on this vital issue, and must be held to account.