Here Come the Black Helicopters!

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 The ATT would effectively repeal the Second Amendment as clearly as the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Prohibition amendment—the Eighteenth.)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:

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.

Thomas Countryman, a US assistant secretary of state, made it clear in April 2012 that the treaty is not aimed at governments. Least of all, ours. “We do not want something that would make legitimate international arms trade more cumbersome than the hurdles United States exporters already face.”⁹

Those who die at the hands of such legitimate arms sales will doubtless be comforted.

GUN REGULATIONS ON THE WAY

The Treaty includes, according to the Independent Sentinel, “the creation of a new UN agency to regulate international weapon sales, and require countries that host firearms manufacturers to set up a compensation fund for victims of gun violence worldwide.”¹⁰

Gun control opponents, writing in the Independent Sentinel, predict that,

While the treaty will doubtless be filled with reassuring disclaimers, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton has seen this kind of thing before. “After the treaty is approved and it comes into force, you will find out that it has this implication or that implication and it requires the Congress to adopt some measure that restricts ownership of firearms,” he warns. “The [Obama] administration knows it cannot obtain this kind of legislation purely in a domestic context…. They will use an international agreement as an excuse to get domestically what they couldn’t otherwise.”¹²

Tom Mason, who represented the World Forum on the Future of Sports Shooting at the UN conference, said, “The treaty is a significant threat to gun owners. I think the biggest threat may be the body that would administer the treaty.”¹³

The ATT sets up an Implementation Support Unit to administer its provisions. Defenders of the treaty counter that it will clearly recognize the right of individual and national self-defense and say that it will be administered by the individual nations themselves, not by the UN.

But the draft treaty provides that “parties [to the ATT] shall take all necessary measures to control brokering activities taking place within its territories… to prevent the diversion of exported arms into the illicit market or to unintended end users.”¹⁴

Opponents of the treaty warn that the Implementation Support United established by the ATT will increase its own powers to make sure that nations who sign the treaty “take all necessary measures” to enforce its ban on arms trafficking. They point out that UN treaties are subject to the kind of mission creep that Ambassador Bolton warns about.

One hundred and thirty members of Congress—organized by Pennsylvania Republican congressman Mike Kelly—wrote to President Obama on July 1, 2012, to express their opposition and concern about the ATT. “The UN’s actions to date indicate that the ATT is likely to pose significant threats to our national security, foreign policy, and economic interests as well as our constitutional rights,” reads the letter. “The US must establish firm red lines for the ATT and state unequivocally that it will oppose the ATT if it infringes on our rights or threatens our ability to defend our interests.”¹⁵ The congressmen demanded that the treaty exclude small arms and ammunition and recognize the right of individual self-defense.

The National Rifle Association attacked the treaty. “Any international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that in any way, shape or form affects the constitutional rights of American gun owners is unacceptable,”¹⁶ Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement. “International organizations and foreign governments do not have the right to restrict the fundamental freedoms handed down to us from our Founding Fathers.”

NRA President Wayne LaPierre testified before the U.N. that “on behalf of all NRA members and American gun owners, we are here to announce that we will not tolerate any attack—from any entity or organization whatsoever—on our Constitution or on the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms.”¹⁷

Ted R. Bromund, senior research fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, at the Heritage Foundation, warns that the ATT is what he calls an “aspirational” treaty, meaning that it sets goals and is less specific about how to achieve them.

He warns that “Americans should realize that many of the risks to US sovereignty posed by the ATT and other aspirational treaties cannot be fully addressed by legislative action, because these risks are inherent in any effort to negotiate vague, aspirational, and universal treaties in a world full of dictatorial states. The best defense against encroachments on US sovereignty—including the ability to conduct foreign policy—rests with oversight by elected officials and the vigilance of American citizens.”¹⁸

The combination of the aspirations of the treaty signatories to curtail small arms throughout the world and the enforcement mechanisms built into the document spell bad news for our Second Amendment freedoms if we ratify the ATT.

HILLARY’S SECRET STRATEGY FOR IMPOSING GUN CONTROLS

NRA president Wayne LaPierre announced in July 2012 that his organization had secured the commitment of fifty-eight US Senators to oppose ratification of the Arms Trade Treaty if it contains any regulation of civilian firearms—far more than the thirty-four required to block Senate ratification. And, on July 26, 2012, fifty-one Senators said they would vote against ratification in its current form. Obama, knowing that if Hillary signed the treaty, as she had pledged to do on July 27, the day after the senatorial letter, the gun issue would become front and center in the presidential race. So the administration pulled back in a tactical retreat and the signing scheduled for that day was canceled. End of story? No way!

Here’s what the play is: The United Nations General Assembly will likely approve the treaty by a two-thirds vote before election day in the US. Then the requisite sixty-five nations will sign and ratify the treaty. That sets its provisions in stone. Obama and Hillary will keep silent until after the election. Then they will sign the treaty—and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, will probably never bring it up for a vote. Knowing he would lose any ratification vote, Reid will just let the treaty take effect under the Vienna Convention—without any approval by the Senate. If President Obama is reelected, he will, of course, refuse to renounce the treaty and it will take effect without a vote of our elected representatives.

The only way to stop the treaty is to defeat Obama and/or elect a Republican Senate.

REPEAL THE REAGAN DOCTRINE

Bromund points out that the ATT is likely to mean one thing to the world’s democracies but something quite different for its tyrannical dictators. He points out that many of the nations that will sign the ATT are “dictatorships. Thus, the treaty will on the one hand recognize that states such as Syria have the right to buy and sell arms and on the other hand require them to establish effective systems of import and export control that, like the current US system, consider the human rights consequences of arms transfers.”

But he points out that “this is a fantasy: If a state like Syria genuinely wanted to establish such a system, the treaty would not be necessary. The ATT will effectively bind only the democracies that accept it.” And, he notes, “the failure of other states to live up to their commitments under the ATT will not cause its restrictions on the US to lapse.”¹⁹

Because the treaty is so deliberately vague, Bromund is troubled. If the treaty comes up for ratification, the Senate will find it difficult to offer informed advice and consent on the ATT because its meaning, and thus the commitments arising from it, are so poorly defined. This will also open the door for US allies with a strong commitment to multilateral institutions, left-wing non-governmental organizations, and dictatorships to pressure the US—and US businesses—to accept their interpretations of the treaty, which will seek to impinge further on US freedom of action. Finally, it will empower US officials to interpret the ATT as they see fit, which, by asking the Senate to write a blank check, raises further concerns about the effectiveness of the Senate’s advice and consent role and the defense of Second Amendment freedoms.

Bromund worries that the treaty will make it impossible for the US to support freedom-loving movements throughout the world. Since the ATT will oblige signatories “not to circumvent the import control systems of other signatories,” he warns that it might enable Iran to condemn the US for violating the ATT if it decided to arm Iranian rebels. The entire future of the Reagan Doctrine—the US support for human rights and pro-freedom rebellions throughout the world—might be imperiled.

Remember that it was the importation of arms to Bosnian rebels in the 1990s that held the Serbian forces at bay and reduced the carnage of their ethnic cleansing. Would the ATT stop the US from sending arms to Africa to prevent a repetition of the Rwanda massacre? Would we be obliged to respect the government of Sudan and not arm the Darfur refugees?

Writing in the New York Post, Heritage Foundation fellow Peter Brookes calls the idea of American participation in the ATT “foolish” and urges us to avoid it “like the plague.”²⁰

He points out, for example, that the treaty would likely bar the US from supplying arms to Taiwan since the UN recognizes only one Chinese government—the one in Beijing—for both the mainland and Formosa. He argues that arms shipments to Taiwan would be illegal under the treaty since the government in Taipei would technically be an insurgent entity, barred from receiving arms under the ATT.

Brookes also notes, “The treaty will also develop a list of criteria that will call upon states to keep arms out of insurgents’ hands or prevent the prolonging of a conflict. Sounds nice—but what if, for instance, we find a group at some point that we want to support that is fighting an evil government? Can’t do it.”²¹

But then Brookes articulates the coup de grace: “[W]ho really expects state sponsors of terrorism to stop arming groups like Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East, the FARC in Latin America and the Taliban and the Lashkar-e-Taiba in South Asia because of a piece of paper signed at the United Nations? Come on.”²²

This treaty is one that will not stop the arms trade. It will not limit the sale by governments of arms to signatory nations. It may stop freedom forces from being able to resist tyranny in their countries. And its implementation by a UN agency—with no further Senate or congressional oversight once the president’s signature is dry on the treaty—could and likely would be used to abuse, override, and limit our Second Amendment right to bear arms.

(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.)