Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Hi all,

as you can see I'm back... I've eventually decided to quit, those who are curious can ask me why if they want, no problem

a friend of mine sent me more informations about John Bolton and the UN Conference, so I post it here as usual

U.N. Out of North America
The Small Arms Conference and the Second Amendment.

Mr. Kopel is research director at the Independence Institute.
August 9, 2001 10:00 a.m.
Editor?s note: This is the fifth installment in an NRO series on the United Nations Conference on Small Arms (the previous installment: #4).



This is not the end. This is the opening skirmish of a war," announced retired Rep. Charles Pashayan (R., Calif., 1979-91), a U.S. delegate to the July 2001 U.N. Small Arms Conference. Pashayan warned that issues of restricting private ownership of firearms, and of banning gun sales to persons not authorized by a government (e.g., freedom fighters), would return, even though they were defeated at the conference.

 As he explained: "All of this has to be understood as part of a process leading ultimately to a treaty that will give an international body power over our domestic laws."
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) didn't like the conference's results either. But she did agree with Pashayan that the battle was just beginning: "[T]he Conference is the first step, not the last, in the international community`s efforts to control the spread of small arms and light weapons."


The U.S.'s biggest loss came when it acceded to demands for a follow-up conference within five years. John Bolton, head of the American delegation, noted that the mandatory follow-up "serves only to institutionalize and bureaucratize this process" ? which is precisely what the gun prohibitionists wanted. At the next round, there will be pressure to replace this year's non-binding Programme of Action with a legally binding Convention. And the European Union has already begun pushing for legal strictures.

In the meantime, the U.N. and related institutions will continue their propaganda campaign against gun owners. The Canadian antigun lobby, for example, is using a recent UNICEF report to demand a tightening of Canada's already severe gun-storage laws. (Canadian law now requires that firearms stored anywhere near a child must be kept unloaded and locked. Prohibitionists are further demanding that all guns be stored at police stations, to be checked out when needed for sport.) The Coalition for Gun Control touts a requirement that all guns be sold with a trigger lock.

Small Arms Destruction Day, on July 9, is just one gun-hate celebration to emerge from the Conference. The antigun NGOs have declared July 11 to be Children and Small Arms Day. Pro-rights activists responded by declaring July 9 to be Buy a Gun Day ? July 11 ought to become Take a Child Shooting Day.

One function of the propaganda war is to portray guns as germs, and gun owners as disease carriers. The World Health Organization, a U.N. body, will play a major role in promoting intolerance against gun owners. Speaking at the Small Arms Conference, Etienne Krug, Director of WHO's Department for Injuries and Violence Prevention, claimed: "The ready availability of small arms has been associated with higher small arms-related mortality rates."

But this is just plain false. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, the regions with the highest gun ownership rates tend to have the lowest gun homicide rates. And, more generally, Krug's focus on "small arms-related mortality rates" cleverly ignores total death rates. In this century, genocide by government is the overwhelming cause of violent death ? far ahead even of deaths from war. Genocide is perpetrated almost exclusively against groups that have first been disarmed. Therefore, it is the absence of firearms that bears a strong association with astronomical rates of violent death ? as detailed in the new book Death by Gun Control, by Aaron Zelman and Richard Stevens (forthcoming this fall from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership). Moreover, cross-national research by Jeffrey Miron of Boston University finds that prohibition of handguns, or of all guns, has a statistically significant relation to higher homicide rates.

Nevertheless, Krug made it clear that WHO is just beginning its antigun work. New reports will gather data to marshal the case against small arms, and the WHO has already funded a "Weapons for Development" program to pay individuals (but not governments) to surrender their firearms. The Solomon Islands have been one target of this program; Niger is next.

Also joining the campaign is the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), based in Cambridge, Mass. Their antigun "medical" conference is slated for Sept. 28-30 in Helsinki. Among the speakers will be Mr. Jo?o Honwana ? chief of the Conventional Weapons Branch of the U.N. Department for Disarmament Affairs.

Opponents of American sovereignty complain that the United States "isolated" itself by stopping the Small Arms Conference from becoming a springboard for disarming freedom fighters (and everyone else not on a government payroll). It's true that the United States took a lonely position by defending the fundamental human right to keep and bear arms. (Although there was tacit support ? for economic rather than ideological reasons ? from Russia, China, and Arab countries, all of which export arms.) But such isolation is a sign of courage, not bad diplomacy.
Under the Reagan administration, for instance, the U.S. often stood alone at the U.N. when supporting democratic Israel, or when condemning Communist human-rights abuses. So long as America stands for the principle behind the Declaration of Independence ? that the only legitimate governments are created by the people to protect God-given human rights ? we will never be popular at a United Nations where dictatorships are the majority, and to which even democratic governments go to evade public accountability.

As detailed by the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute the U.N. has become a haven for radical social planners seeking to impose their will, free of public scrutiny.

For instance: Days before the Small Arms Conference opened, newspapers reported on the public discussions at a U.N. Conference on HIV/AIDS. More significantly, however, was the "intense debate . . . taking place in basement conference rooms about the very nature of human sexuality, and whether or not the U.N. should promote the complete transformation of sexual norms."

Guidelines created in 1998 by the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights favor "penalties for vilification of people who engage in same-sex relationships." Such a provision would make priests, ministers, or rabbis into criminals, simply for reading aloud what the Bible says about homosexuality.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that any person accused of a crime has the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." But the U.N. Guidelines would allow people to "bring cases under pseudonym."

Americans almost unanimously oppose forcing children to view pornography ? but the U.N. Guidelines demand mandatory homosexual education for children, with the proviso that the education be so explicit that it be exempted from "censorship or obscenity laws." The U.N. Guidelines also require the legalization of homosexual marriage.
Strong objections ? especially from Islamic nations ? prevented the Conference agreement from including the U.N. Guidelines in the Draft Declaration of Commitment. Ireland, through its membership in the European Union, argued in favor of adopting the Guidelines ? which would have allowed European courts to impose them as binding law within Ireland.

Section 41 of the Irish Constitution requires the Irish government to "to guard with special care the institution of Marriage." But, at the U.N., Ireland could promote a radical transformation of marriage. The weekly Irish Catholic newspaper exposed the delegation's activities, only to be met with implausible denials from the Irish government.

As C-FAM's report on the incident concludes, there are "worries that this pattern will be repeated in many of the other states now seeking membership in the EU, states including Malta, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The EU will provide an opportunity for these countries' elites, who are usually more liberal than average citizens, to change their own constitutions without the consent of their own people."

As the Irish case illustrates, the U.N. is an ideal forum for governments to surreptitiously impose policies they could never impose through national, representative institutions. This is one reason why U.S. gun- prohibition groups reacted with such fury to the Bush administration's stance at the U.N. Small Arms Conference.

The U.S. delegation consistently rejected efforts at "compromise," which would have kept some antigun language in the treaty, but made it softer and ambiguous. An American delegation that was terrified of being "isolated" would have accepted the ambiguous language ? on the theory that Americans could later apply a pro-rights interpretation to the ambiguities. The Bush delegation was wiser: It recognized that, at the U.N., a conference final document is just a starting point. From there, U.N. bureaucrats will "monitor" how a country "complies" with such documents, and the bureaucrats resolving the ambiguities will favor their own radical agendas. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, for example, is being reinterpreted by U.N. bureaucrats in ways never agreed to by the governments that signed the convention.


The U.N.'s assault on Second Amendment rights is merely one aspect of a far-reaching attack on nearly every aspect of the American Bill of Rights. Consider, for example, the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, scheduled for Aug. 31-Sept. 7 in Durban, South Africa. A U.N.-convened "expert seminar" on anti-racism remedies came up with the following standards for acceptable anti-racism laws:

First, "the highest priority should be given" to "reparations" for "descendants of slaves." (Don't expect that this clause will lead to African governments ? successors to those governments which profited most from the slave trade, by supplying captured enemies for sale to European traders ? to send money to African Americans.)

Additionally, the premise of "innocent until proven guilty" is not acceptable to the United Nations. The U.N. seminar insists that "In allegations of racial discrimination, the onus of proof must rest with the respondent to rebut the allegation made by the victim of racism."

Commendably, the Bush administration is considering boycotting the conference, or downgrading its delegation, in part because of Arab efforts to have Zionism proclaimed a form of racism.

The Small Arms Conference helped alert Americans to the nature of the U.N. threat. Yet while dangers to gun rights, property rights, and family rights are becoming well known among pro-freedom activists, the U.N.'s campaigns against due process and free speech have remained more obscure. La Verkin, Utah, recently declared itself a U.N.-free zone ? forbidding U.N. symbols on city property, stating that U.N. orders are invalid in La Verkin, and banning city contracts with businesses that work with the U.N. The "U.N.-free zone" movement is backed by a group called U.N. Watch, which provides cities with model language.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard responded: "I would just hope that the people of La Verkin would see the United Nations for what it really is ? an intergovernmental organization working for the betterment of humankind, and not a threat to the people of La Verkin." He's right ? if you consider the Bill of Rights to be an impediment to the betterment of mankind.

American grassroots groups are just beginning to educate the American people about the efforts of foreign tyrants to disarm them. The Tyranny Response Team, in conjunction with the Second Amendment Sisters, Gun Owners of America, and other groups, staged a protest at the U.N. on July 14. The Heritage Foundation's U.N. Assessment Project ? concerned with U.N. attacks on American sovereignty, and on the Bill of Rights ? plans to seek official NGO status at the U.N., to obtain a better platform to speak for liberty, and to warn Americans about U.N. activities. A Heritage Foundation conference on the U.N. is scheduled for September, in Washington. In Congress, H.R. 1146, the American Sovereignty Restoration Act, would end U.S. membership in the United Nations.
 
George Washington never saw a United Nations conference, but he knew enough about human nature to see the dangers of all that the U.N. represents. Washington's Farewell Address urged: "Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government."

U.N. Gives Tyranny a Hand
Dictatorships are using the U.N. to promote the firearms policies of Hitler.

Mr. Kopel is research director at the Independence Institute.
August 6, 2001 2:25 p.m.

Editor?s note: This is the fourth installment in an NRO series on the United Nations Conference on Small Arms (the previous installment: #3).


At the U.N. Small Arms Conference, Iran took the lead in promoting a ban on weapons supplies to non-states. The "non-state actors" clause would require vendors "to supply small arms and light weapons only to governments, or to entities duly authorized by government." This would make it illegal, for example, to supply weapons to the Kurds or religious minorities in Iran, in case Iranian persecution or genocide drove them to rebellion. Had the provision been in effect in 1776, the sale of firearms to the American Patriots would have been prohibited.

Had the clause been in effect during World War II, the transfer of Liberator pistols to the French Resistance, and to many other resistance groups, would have been illegal.
The United States stood firm against this clause, rejecting "compromise" efforts to revise the language, or to insert it into the preamble of the Program of Action. Although Canada pushed hard on this point, the U.S. delegation would not relent. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton pointed out that the proposal "would preclude assistance to an oppressed non-state group defending itself from a genocidal government."

Bolton's statement, by the way, reflects the enormous contribution that Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership has made to gun debate, through historical research demonstrating the victim disarmament is the sine qua non of genocide.

More recent research by constitutional attorney Stephen Halbrook has detailed how the Nazi regime used firearms-control laws, enacted by the democratic Weimar Republic, to disarm potential opponents of the regime, and to facilitate the persecution of Jews.

U.N. Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette (of Canada) explained that in some parts of the world, an AK-47 could be obtained for $15 or a bag of grain. Small-arms "proliferation erodes the authority of legitimate but weak governments,'' she complained.

U.S. delegate Faith Whittlesey (ambassador to Switzerland, under Reagan) replied that the U.N. "non-state actors" provision "freezes the last coup. It favors established governments, while taking away rights from individuals. It does not recognize any value higher than peace, such as liberty."

According to the U.N., any government with a U.N. delegation is a "legitimate" government. This U.N. standard directly conflicts with the Declaration of Independence, which states that the only legitimate governments are those "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

In a letter to the New York Times, answering a Times editorial criticizing the U.S. for not allowing the conference to be used as a tool to disarm civilians, Whittlesey elaborated:

The highest priority of freedom-loving people is liberty, even more than peace. The small arms you demonize often protect men, women and children from tyranny, brutality and even the genocide too frequently perpetrated by governments and police forces. The world's numerous dictators would be delighted to stem the flow of small arms to indigenous freedom fighters and civilians alike to minimize any resistance.. . .

The right of individual self-defense in the face of criminal intimidation and government aggression is a deeply held belief of the American people dating back to 1776, when small arms in the hands of private individuals were the means used to secure liberty and independence.
The United Nations Conference on Small Arms was held in a room where a large poster proclaimed: "SMALL ARMS KILL WOMEN & CHILDREN." (Meanwhile, the U.N. propaganda office and its accomplices in the U.S. media claimed that there was no antigun agenda at the conference.) The U.N. says that small arms kill 500,000 people a year: 300,000 in war, and another 200,000 from murder, suicide, and accidents. Put aside, the fact that most war deaths are caused by governments, which wouldn't be disarmed under the U.N. program. Also put aside questions about whether the U.N. antigun program would really disarm murderers. And forget the topic of whether antigun laws might reduce gun suicides or gun accidents, but would save few, if any, lives ? since self-destructive people have many potential tools available.

Let us assume that the U.N. antigun program ? which, as I detailed in a previous column, is a program for slow-motion disarmament of everyone except the government ? would save every single one of those 500,000 lives.


Now, compare those half-million annual deaths with the 170 million civilians (not soldiers) who were murdered by governments in the first nine decades of the last century, as detailed by University of Hawaii political scientist Rudy Rummel.

Given that democide ? Rummel's term for mass murders by government ? appears to be confined almost exclusively to regimes which have attempted to disarm their victims, it is reasonable to conclude that if every man and woman on this planet had owned a working firearm and ammunition, many ? perhaps nearly all ? of those 179 million lives might have been saved.

If small arms are really as destructive as the U.N. claims, it would still take 340 years for small arms to kill as many people as died from 1900 to 1990 due to the lack of small arms. Stated another way, even if we accept every one of the premises of the antigun advocates at the U.N., gun prohibition appears to be about four times deadlier than gun proliferation.
Gun "proliferation" begins with "pro" and "life." Gun prohibition begins with registration, and ends with genocide.

Besides serving as the sine qua non of genocide, civilian disarmament helps dictatorships maintain their power ? as demonstrated by the string of dictatorships that rose to support U.N. efforts to disarm everyone except the government.

Djbrina Moumouni, secretary general of the cabinet of the president of the Niger called illicit weapons "a scourge" which cause "drug trafficking, mass displacement, slow economic development and recovery, and the exacerbation of conflicts. The Niger has not escaped that fallout, and has suffered armed rebellion for some years now."

The Niger delegate's speech was a euphemistic reference to the fact that the pastoral Tuareg people of northern Niger, in the Sahara, spent much of the 1990s fighting for their independence from Niger. The Tuareg objected to uranium being extracted from their region, while profits went to people connected to the far-away central government.

To stay in Niger, the Tuareg wanted federalism and some regional autonomy. Their desire to leave was greatly intensified when they starved en masse in 1984-85 thanks to the Niger government's venality and incompetence. And the central government of Niger, which tends to alternate between military dictatorships and one-party civilian dictatorships, hasn't exactly been a good place for people to work within the system.


A report from the European Centre for Conflict Prevention, a pro-disarmament group, describes these problems in Niger quite straightforwardly, and explains that the UN's solution is to disarm the Tuareg:

The United Nations have not been directly involved in managing the conflict, but the organisation is dealing with a closely related issue: the proliferation of small arms in the region. In 1993, it set up an Advisory Mission on the issue, at the request of President Konar? of Mali. The mission produced its findings to the Secretary-General in 1996. It identified a variety of causes for the unfettered flow of arms, including political instability, poverty, unemployment, ethnic and religious differences and the spill-over of intra-state conflicts into other states. This was said to apply to most of the states visited during the mission, including Niger.

What the European Centre and the U.N. (and their prohibitionist allies in private organizations) fail to understand is that in places like Niger, small arms are part of the solution, not the problem. The Niger government only began to make small steps towards treating the Tuareg better when the Tuareg were able to initiate an armed rebellion. One of the reasons that the Niger government never had the choice of following the policy of the Rwanda government (perpetrating genocide against a disaffected ethnic group) was that the Tuareg were armed.

Likewise presenting an articulate defense of the pro-dictatorship position was Gaspar Santos Rufino, Vice-Minister for Defenze of Angola: "African leaders, in analyzing the causes of the proliferation and illicit trafficking of small arms, suggest that Member States and the suppliers should be more transparent in their conduct and go beyond national interests. This means, so far as possible, to impose limits on the legal production of certain basic goods, to exercise rigorous control of their circulation, and even to destroy surplus production of goods.


"It should be possible to do this with small arms and light weapons, as they are not basic goods and will not be missed by our people."
Mr. Rufino, of course, is the Defense Minister of a Communist dictatorship which was installed by the Cuban army's small arms and light weapons in 1975-76, and which has permitted exactly one election (criticized by some as fraudulent) in the last quarter-century.

Rufino complained: "In Angola, men with guns in their hands have opposed the legitimate Government for many years. It should be clear that it is imperative to destroy surplus arms, regulate their production in the legislation of manufacturing countries, and sell them to legally constituted and authorized entities."

The "men with guns in their hands" are the men of UNITA, one of the groups that (along with Rufino's Communist organization) fought against the Portuguese colonial regime until Portugal surrendered in 1975. Rufino's side would have lost the civil war which followed, but for Fidel Castro's modern-day Hessians.

What makes Rufino's dictatorship ? created by Cuban "men with guns in their hands" ? legitimate? As Rufino shows, beneath the veneer of humanitarian rhetoric, the objective of small arms prohibition is to ensure that unpopular dictatorships enjoy a monopoly of force.
Yasir Arafat's U.N. delegate charged that Israel arms its settlers illegally, thus turning them into a militia. She demanded that Israel to disarm the settlers.


Nguyen Thanh Chau of Viet Nam, a communist dictatorship which shot its way into power, called for "a comprehensive approach to the prevention, reduction and eradication of the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons at all levels."
Sar Kheng, Minister of the Interior of Cambodia, represented a nation which, under its previous rulers, had taken care to confiscate guns before slaughtering a third of the population.


Cambodian gun control had been a legacy of French colonialism. A series of Royal Ordinances, decreed by a monarchy subservient to the French, appears to have been enacted out of fear of the Communist and anti-colonial insurgencies that were taking place in the 1920s and 1930s in Southeast Asia, although not in Cambodia. The first law, in 1920, dealt with the carrying of guns, while the last law, in 1938, imposed a strict licensing system. Only hunters could have guns, and they were allowed to own only a single firearm. These colonial laws appear to have stayed in place after Cambodia was granted independence. The Khmer Rouge enacted no new gun control laws, for they enacted no laws at all other than a Constitution.

As detailed in the book Lethal Laws, the moment the Khmer Rouge took power, they set out to disarm the populace. One Cambodian recalls that
Eang [a woman] watched soldiers stride onto the porches of the houses and knock on the doors and ask the people who answered if they had any weapons. "We are here now to protect you," the soldiers said, "and no one has a need for a weapon any more." People who said that they kept no weapons were forced to stand aside and allow the soldiers to look for themselves. . . . The round-up of weapons took nine or ten days, and once the soldiers had concluded the villagers were no longer armed, they dropped their pretense of friendliness. . . . The soldiers said everyone would have to leave the village for a while, so that the troops could search for weapons; when the search was finished, they could return.
People being forced out of villages and cities were searched thoroughly, and weapons and foreign currency were confiscated. To the limited extent that Cambodians owned guns through the government licensing system, the names of registered gun owners were of course available to the new government.

The current (non-genocidal) Communist dictatorship in Cambodia does not trust its people with arms any more than its predecessor did. The UN delegate called "illegally held arms" (e.g., all civilian arms) major obstacles to efforts to reconstruct and rehabilitate the country and to the building of democracy and respect for human rights."


He explained:
The Government of Cambodia has designated management of all arms and explosives as its major task, and has instituted several measures, such as collecting and confiscating all arms, explosives and ammunition left by the war; instituting practical measures to reduce the reckless use of arms; and strengthening the management of weapons registration.

Those who possessed weapons during the civil war wish to continue possessing them for self-protection. On the other hand, criminals have no intention of giving up their weapons, because they need them to carry out their criminal offences. However, with assistance from the European Union and from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), there has been some success in raising the awareness of the problem among a majority of Camobodians.

To date, more than 112,000 light weapons, together with several tons of arms, explosives and ammunition, have been collected. More than 50 per cent of those weapons and some 4,000 landmines have been crushed and burned in public ceremonies under the slogan "Flames for Peace."
Like Cambodia, Pakistan has a dictatorship determined to possess a monopoly of force. According to Human Rights Watch, the military dictatorship perpetrates torture and many other human rights abuses.

Moin-Ud-Din Haider, Minister of the Interior, said, "Pakistan has become a victim of the proliferation of small arms and light weapons?" "It has threatened our political stability," he explained, meaning that arms held by the civilians threatened the power of Mr. Haider's military dictatorship.
"Since February of last year," he boasted, "we have not issued a single license for any weapon" ? demonstrating how a licensing system can be easily converted to a prohibition system.

He continued: "We have also prohibited the public display of weapons" ? a parallel to his dictatorship's ban on public rallies and demonstrations.
"We have started a weapons collection programme composed of two phases. In Phase I, the Government announced general amnesty from 5 to 20 June for voluntary surrender of illicit weapons" ? similar to the gun surrender program run by President Clinton's Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, and recently terminated by the Bush administration. Under both the Clinton and the Pakistani program, the targeted weapons firearms owned by civilians, regardless of criminality.


Pakistan's delegate turned to the gun licensing system: "At present, the campaign to recover illicit weapons from those who did not surrender their weapons during the amnesty period is in full swing. During the amnesty period, we acquired a total of 86,757 weapons. In Phase II, we plan to cancel all automatic weapons licenses, which were loosely issued in the thousands by previous governments. Revalidation of existing arms licenses will be handled with great care."


In other words, the gun licenses which were issued by the democratic government would be eliminated by the dictatorship. As in Weimar/Nazi Germany, the licensing law created by the democracy proves to be a useful prohibition tool for the dictatorship.
Finally, the Pakistani Interior Minister made a brief pretense of pretending to respect Pakistan's traditional culture of gun ownership, before announcing the government's plan to obliterate it:

It must be emphasized that in segments of our society, possessing and carrying arms has been a proud cultural legacy. However, to their credit, many such people voluntarily surrendered their weapons. Thus, while the Government has sought to implement sound strategies, the real winners are the people of Pakistan, whose concern, cooperation and willingness to make ours a weapon-free society went a long way in launching our campaign on a promising note.


The wretched dictatorships endorsing the U.N.'s antigun program wouldn't have surprised the federalist Noah Webster. Arguing in 1787 for adoption of the proposed American Constitution, Webster urged Americans not to worry that the new federal government could become a military dictatorship, for "Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed." (An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (Philadelphia 1787)."

The "United Nations" was originally a name for the coalition that defeated the Axis in World War II. But today, gun prohibitionists and dictatorships are using the United Nations to promote the firearms policies of Hitler and Hirohito: First, preventing aid to victims to genocide and tyranny. And second, obliterating the moral distinction between free governments, which are founded on the consent of the governed, and dictatorships, whose victims have the God-given right to remove them by force of arms.

about happy-slapping

However being thatthye travel in large groups they will occasionaly dare someone to take on a harder looking target and goad them into it. That could be anybody here. All the martial arts in the world might not help you against 15 to 20 drug crazed teenage punks bent on hurting you. Whetehr you carry or not, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.

that's why I carry everyday an OC Spray... creating a "cloud" can always be usefull so as to help you to escape IMO

Hi all,

here's more information about John Bolton's role at the Small Arms Conference (and about this conference itself) that I've found recently:

US v UN
Tuesday, August 7, 2001


Bypassing U.S. Voters

Rejected by the American electorate, antigun groups find themselves at home at the U.N.

Read about it: National Review


Mr. Kopel is research director at the Independence Institute.
August 3, 2001 9:10 a.m.
Editor?s note: This is the third installment in an NRO series on the United Nations Conference on Small Arms (the previous installment: #2).



Rejected by the electorate last November, American gun prohibition found the United Nations Conference on Small Arms to be the friendliest of venues.

Appalled by the Bush administration's insistence that the U.N. conference not become a springboard for the destruction of Second Amendment rights, a coalition of antigun groups organized a demonstration outside the U.N. during the conference. In conjunction the demonstration, the groups released a joint letter stating that the conference proved the necessity of additional antigun laws in the U.S. The groups included the Children's Defense Fund (an anti-welfare reform group), the Brady Campaign (formerly known as Handgun Control, Inc., formerly known as the National Council to Control Handguns), Physicians for Social Responsibility, "Million" Mom March chapters, and various other local groups. The letter read: "The Cold War is over, but the international community is suffering from a new source of terror: the glut of small arms and 'civilian' weapons that are seeping from many industrialized nations, through channels both legal and illegal, to virtually all four corners of the globe."

Note that the very idea of "civilians" owning weapons had to be put in quotation marks.

The "Million" Mom March, hadn't been doing very well before the UN met. The group had trouble getting attendance into three digits at its last Washington rally, turned out to be a political liability for Al Gore and many other candidates, had to lay off 30 of its 35 staff, was kicked out of its free office space in San Francisco General Hospital when it was discovered that the space was obtained by fraud, and finally ended up being absorbed into the Brady Campaign, unable to exist as a viable separate organization. But at the U.N., the group's leader, pretending that she represented and strong, independent grassroots organization, won a standing ovation from the delegates.

And if the group could claim that 850,000 people showed up at its Washington rally in May 2000 (when the true size, based on D.C. transit figures and crowd photos, was 100,000 or less) why not increase the mathematical fiction? So the "Million" Mom March now claims to be an organization representing a "Billion" mothers worldwide. As if a billion women have even heard of this failed US group.

But the U.N. made its support for the "Billion" prohibitionist movement clear. The press conference announcing the new group was run by U.N. Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala, head of the U.N. Department of Disarmament. Dhanapala called the group "vital" to global disarmament, and urged the billion/million members to act "through their legislatures and governments to ensure that the program of action is in fact implemented."

The anti-Bush demonstration featured five huge ugly puppets representing the United Kingdom, US, Russia, China, and France, created by the U.S. gun-prohibition group Silent March. (Apparently the fact that the U.K. and France were working hard for Silent March's agenda wasn't enough to get in the way of some mean-spirited street theater.) The U.S. puppet, resembling President Bush, wore a gaudy Uncle Sam hat and a necklace of bullets, and was smoking a cigar that on closer inspection was also a bullet. The puppet sported an "NRA" sticker, and the sign worn by the person holding this puppet read: "US: Puppet of Gun Lobby?"
Silent March revealed a lot about its overall political orientation when it decided that dressing somebody up like Uncle Sam was an insult.

The conference provided an opportunity for several international groups have come out of the closet on their antigun stance. For years Amnesty International has organized and coordinated international antigun work, but has insisted that it is doing nothing to promote gun control. But at the Conference, Amnesty International USA Executive Director William F. Schulz said, "Gun trafficking is a critical human rights issue around the world, but the problem begins at home." He blamed "Loose gun regulation ? in [countries such as] the USA, Russia or Liberia."

"Should human rights abusers be given arms?" asked Amnesty International, although the group had nothing to say about arms for people resisting human-rights abuses.

The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) is the global consortium of antigun non-government organizations (NGOs). The IANSA site happens to be hosted on the website of Oxfam, a world hunger group with wide-ranging hard left agenda. Save the Children and World Vision also complained about the U.S. position at the conference ? revealing the strong leftist tilt that careful observers have seen in these organizations in recent years ? but which has, discretely, not been publicized to the organizations' American donor base.

July 16 of the conference featured two hours of speeches by anti-gun groups, plus a half-hour for pro-rights organizations. The gun prohibition forces claimed to be motivated by saving innocent lives, but their rhetoric showed much more interest in stopping guns than in saving lives. In case of a conflict, they clearly preferred the former to the latter.

Neil Arya of Physicians for Global Survival in Canada asserted that physicians don't care where a shooting was the result of a suicide, accident or homicide, or whether the shooter was a gangster, a soldier, or a law-abiding gun owner. In other words, his group sees no distinction between a gangster murdering a robbery victim, a victim saving her life by shooting the gangster, a Nazi soldier shooting a Jew, and an American soldier shooting a Nazi soldier.


A press release from Silent March complained that the U.S. had "rejected a call for states to stop arming guerrillas in other countries." The press release came after Undersecretary Bolton had explained that the U.S. objected to the provision because it would prevent aid to groups which were resisting genocide. Silent March promotes itself as a humanitarian group concerned about gun death, but this concern apparently vanishes when the victims are being murdered by governments.

This is the moral upside-down world of the United Nations culture, in which victims who resist genocide, and governments which help the victims resist, are condemned as immoral.

The gun prohibition groups also talked a lot about the need to keep guns out of the hands of "children." These demands who not limited to keep guns out of the hands of child soldiers. Rather, the groups were following Hillary Clinton's position that children and guns shouldn't even be in the same sentence. U.S. gun-prohibition groups have been long at work to frighten parents into not allowing children to participate in the shooting sports, and to enact gun licensing laws that prohibit young people from hunting or target shooting, even under immediate parental supervision. (For example, in New Jersey, it's a felony to take your ten-year-old to a target range and let the child use a Red Ryder BB gun while you supervise.)

Stymied in free elections in the United States, the gun-prohibition lobbies in 1998 turned to the courts, filing meritless suits against gun manufacturers, with the hope of imposing de facto prohibition through bankruptcy. As the lawsuit strategy falls apart, gun-prohibition groups now seek their victory through international law. The further that the locus of decision moves from democratic, American control, the better the chances for success of the prohibition movement.

US v UN
Monday, July 30, 2001

Score One For Bush

The United Nations "small arms" conference has concluded, with no immediate damage done to individual rights - thanks to the "hard-line position" of the Bush Administration.


Read about it: National Review

The United Nations "small arms" conference has concluded, with no immediate damage done to individual rights ? thanks to the magnificent performance of the Bush administration. But the conference will be back five years hence, and the next five years will see continued efforts by the United Nations to find ways to undermine the right to keep and bear arms.
The beginning of the conference on July 9 was commemorated with the celebration of the U.N.'s "Small Arms and Light Weapons Destruction Day." Around the world, governments made huge piles of firearms ? not firearms owned by the government, but rather firearms seized by the government from other people.

Even more enthusiastic promotion of Destruction Day could be found at the website of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), a collection of antigun non-governmental organizations (NGOs) ? and also the best web source of documents relating to the Conference.

Of course guns meant for destruction could simply be crushed ? but mere crushing would not excite the special symbolism of destruction by burning. Destruction by burning provides the spectators the joy of watching the burning take place slowly. That is one reason why heretics were often burned at the stake rather than executed in a less time-consuming way.

July 9 was not the first time that governments had lit bonfires to destroy resistance to the power of the government. Germany's Josef Goebbels ordered all Jewish books to be burned in public on May 10, 1933.

University towns were centers of Jewish Books Destruction Day.
As the V?lkischer Beobachter ("Populist Observer") reported on May 12, 1933, "The German student body of the Berlin universities assembled yesterday for a torchlight procession on Hegel Platz. They formed up, accompanied by a truckload of 25,000 books and writings harmful to the people. The procession ended at Opera Platz, where as a symbolic act, these Un-German writings were set aflame on a pile of logs."

The burning of Jewish and un-German books was followed within a few years by the burning of Jews and other un-German people. Jewish Books Destruction Day helped change popular consciousness so as to pave the way for genocide. Likewise paving the way for genocide was the systematic disarmament of Jews and all other opposition elements, in Nazi Germany itself and in conquered territories.

How long until a U.N.-declared official day of hate is celebrated with governments actually killing people?

That day has already come. The U.N.'s Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNDCP) has declared that every June 26 shall be celebrated as United Nations's International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Trafficking. June 26 is the anniversary of the signing of the declaration at 1987 International Conference on Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. The declaration is the basis for the U.N.'s 1988 Convention Against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychoactive Substances.

This treaty commits its signatories, including the United States, to maintaining a policy of domestic prohibition.

As I'll detail in upcoming columns, the long-term objective of many at the Small Arms Conference was to replicate the success of their predecessors at the Drugs and Psychoactive Substances Conference ? creating an international regime of prohibition, enforced not only by individual governments, but by transnational power ? and explicitly designed to destroy the freedom of individual governments to choose to change their prohibition laws in the future.

So China celebrated U.N. drug hate day by executing 59 drug criminals. Although the Chinese Communist government asserts that all the executed are "drug traffickers," Amnesty International has shown otherwise. In one case, a young woman was returning to her home province from her honeymoon in January 1996. An acquaintance offered to pay her to carry a package for him, as is common in China. On the train, she became suspicious, and attempted to open the package, but could not. A ticket checker noticed her agitation, and notified the police. The Guangxi High People's Court sentenced her to death on June 26, 1996, in honor of U.N. Anti-Drug Day.

At a 2001 press conference, U.N. deputy spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva was asked about China's execution festival. While acknowledging that "as far as I am aware the convention does not provide for the application of the death penalty," the U.N. spokesman did not criticize the Chinese executions.

According to Harry Wu's Laogai Research Foundation, Chinese doctors are required to promptly harvest organs whenever a group of anti-drug executions is scheduled. Kidneys, other organs, and even skin are sold for as much as $15,000.

Colombia, Afghanistan, and other nations held events in conjunction with the U.N. which did not involve any executions, but instead dedicated the day to fireworks and various forms of anti-drug propaganda.

What does the future hold as "Small Arms and Light Weapons Destruction Day" on July 9 works its way onto the U.N. holiday calendar? Will the mass burning of weapons help set the stage for mass executions of "gun traffickers"? Will the U.N. sponsor events around the world designed to reinforce fears about small arms, and to forestall dissent about small-arms prohibition? Regardless of whether one likes or dislikes the U.N. anti-drug program, it provides the tested blueprint for a long-term U.N. program against guns.

Already, the public-relations effort to equate guns and drugs has begun. The U.N. Development Program announced that drugs are the largest illicit business in the world, and arms trafficking is second. At the Small Arms Conference, Durga P. Bhattarai of Nepal expressed the commonly held view that (non-government) guns were as pernicious as drugs, as he asserted that guns turn children into "addicted killers."

Back in the U.S., Second Amendment activists declared July 9 to be National Firearms Purchase Day, urging citizens to buy small arms or small-arms ammunition.

As July 9 approached, hundreds of American sent the U.N. angry e-mails, protesting the upcoming small-arms conference. The U.N. adopted a two-fold approach: 1. Turning many of the e-mails over to its security office, apparently under the theory that anyone who holds strong opinions on Second Amendment rights must be dangerous ? even though not one of the letters made a threat.

2. Producing a press release claiming that the conference posed no threat to law-abiding gun owners. The last claim was a patent falsehood, although of much the American media took the U.N.'s public-relations arm at its word, and failed to observe the massive evidence that restricting domestic-gun ownership was very much an intended purpose of the conference.

The two-week conference was the result of General Assembly Resolution 54/54, adopted Dec. 15, 1999. According to the U.N. itself, the conference "was convened to address the increasing threat to human security from the spread of small arms and light weapons and their illegal trade." Note that "illegal trade" is only one part of the threat. "The spread of small arms" is considered a threat in itself.

At the conference, speaker after speaker made it clear that "excessive" quantities of guns (i.e., any guns in civilian hands) was a problem in itself, separate from the issue of illegal trade. Rey Pagtakhan, the Canadian secretary of state, condemned "The excessive and destabilizing accumulation and uncontrolled spread of small arms."

Ireland's U.N. delegate declared, "States must stop exporting of small arms and light weapons to all except other governments. All states must suppress private ownership of small arms and light weapons."

Yemen's Abdalla Saleh Al-Ashtal explained: "The goal is to prevent any further increase in the traffic in small arms. It is a problem which relates not only to the illicit trade, but to all issues connected with the legal trade." He touted the situation in Yemen, where "individuals voluntarily surrender their weapons. The media is used to convince people to hand over their weapons."

Burchell Whiteman, Minister of Education, Youth and Culture of Jamaica called guns and drugs "a double-barreled force of evil and mayhem." Since the imposition of Jamaican gun prohibition in the 1970s, the Jamaican government has used gun and drug prohibition as justifications for eliminating almost all privacy and due-process elements of the common-law legal tradition.

"The time has come," Jamaica's minister continued, "for the international community, particularly States which manufacture arms, to consider the implementation of measures that would limit the production of such weapons to levels that meet the needs for defence and national security." In other words, Jamaica's ban on gun possession by citizens should spread worldwide.

Proposed language required signatory governments to "seriously consider" banning civilian ownership of small arms "designed for military purposes" ? a proposal that would outlaw the M1 carbine, M1 Garand (designed for World War II), many antique firearms (designed for the Civil War), and scores of bolt-action rifles (designed for World War I). Since almost all guns are derivative of military designs (with a few obscure exceptions such as biathlon trainers), the language would have been a wedge for near-total gun prohibition. The U.N.'s January 9, 2001 " Draft Programme of Action" mandated that: "Where appropriate, moratoria on the production, export and import of small arms and light weapons will be developed and implemented on a regional and subregional basis."

The opening of the conference was marked by the unveiling of The Art of Peacemaking, a five-ton sculpture created by Canadians Sandra Bromley and Wallis Kendal with a subsidy from the Canadian War Museum. The sculpture consists of 7,000 firearms welded together into a giant cube, designed to remind viewers of a tomb or a prison. This sculpture perfectly symbolized the U.N. philosophy of guns: violence comes not from the human heart, but from bad objects, and the duty of the U.N. is to destroy those objects.

The American media blazed with fury that the National Rifle Association was impeding U.N. efforts to control rocket launchers. But the U.N. definition of small arms plainly did include ordinary firearms, and encompassed revolvers, self-loading pistols, ordinary rifles, "assault" rifles, submachine guns, and light machine guns. The "Light weapons" category included heavy machine guns, mortars, hand grenades, grenade launchers, portable anti-aircraft or anti-tank guns, and portable missile launchers.

Notably, Small Arms Destruction Day and the "Art of Peacemaking" sculpture weren't about grenades or rocket launchers; they celebrated the destruction of firearms.

The U.N.'s draft protocol for the conference called for "tighter control over their [firearms and ammunition] legal transfer," for "strengthening current laws and regulation?concerning their use and civilian possession," and for "enhancing accountability, transparency and the exchange of information at the national, regional and global levels." This latter goal (a euphemism for universal gun registration in U.N.-run databases) was to be achieved by "systematic tracking of firearms and, where possible, their parts and components and ammunition from manufacturer to purchaser."

Government-owned firearms were to be explicitly exempted from these controls.

The "European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control, affiliated with the United Nations" was somewhat more explicit:

>Bringing the diffusion of firearms under control is not merely a legal act, it requires to overcome the latent gun culture whose 'virus' is more firmly established in some societies than in others. Unfortunately the propagation of the gun culture is presently well entrenched in the global electronic media. Some non-governmental organisations like the US-based National Rifle Association strategically sponsor the gun culture.

The European Institute called for "obligatory liability insurance" for gun owners, plus an "ammunition tax" and "firearm recycling deposit" ? whose proposed benefits including making guns less affordable. Further, ammunition calibers "5.56 (223), 7.62 (.308), and 9mm would be reserved for the military and police." So "In a period of less than ten years compulsory changes of the calibers of weapons in private possession could be implemented." An ammunition ban "should be acceptable to all nations because it does not directly interfere with national regulations of private ownership of guns."

Likewise pushing for
severe domestic restrictions was the " Eminent Persons Group" (no kidding) consisting of 23 anti-gun busybodies. American members included U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and Robert McNamara, who followed his tenure as the worst defense secretary (leading the U.S. into what he knew was an unwinnable war in Vietnam) with an even more destructive, albeit quieter, tenure as president of the World Bank, in which he shoveled aid and loans at third-world kleptocracies which used the money to oppress their subject peoples. The indigenous victims of the World Bank/kleptocracy alliance are the kind of people whom the Eminent Persons Group does not want to have guns.

Formally, the conference was only supposed to lead to a nonbinding protocol. But Norway called for a legally binding document. And gun-prohibition advocates insisted that even a nonbinding document have led to a mandatory review of national responses.

In short, the U.N.'s protestations that the conference had nothing to do with American gun possession was true only in the hypertechnical sense that Bill Clinton's claim that he "did not have sex" (meaning sexual intercourse) with Monica Lewinsky was technically true. The point of the conference was to create long-term international pressure for severe restrictions on American gun rights, even though the conference itself would not directly impose those restrictions.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan equated small arms to nuclear weapons or chemical warfare weapons ? thus demonizing them, and implying that they should never be in civilian hands. He said that small arms are "'weapons of mass destruction' in terms of the carnage they cause." Annan compared the current campaign against small arms to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) ? whose objective, of course, is total prohibition. The ICBL, by the way, proclaims that it is about "much more than the eventual elimination of landmines", and is furious at the Bush administration's stance at the U.N. Small Arms Conference.

On July 9, the opening day of the conference, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton ruined the mood of Small Arms Destruction Day. Bolton's opening statement warned that "the United States will not join consensus on a final document that contains measures abrogating the constitutional right to bear arms."

Bolton added: "The United States believes that the responsible use of firearms is a legitimate aspect of national life ? Like many countries, the United States has a cultural tradition of hunting and sport shooting." He laid down the U.S. position: "We do not support measures that would constrain legal trade and legal manufacturing of small arms and light weapons." Bolton stood against "the promotion of international advocacy activity by international or non-governmental organizations" and against "measures that prohibit civilian possession of small arms."

At a news conference, Bolton explained that the U.S. was eager to deal with actual problems of misuse: "If the conference can concentrate on the central issue of the flow of illicit weapons into agreement. But if it drifts off into areas that are properly the area of national level decision-making, then I think there will be difficulties."

Rep. Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican who also serves on the board of the National Rifle Association, was the only legislator who was an official member of the U.S. delegation. Since the U.S. has the world's strictest controls on arms-broker exports, Barr pointed out that "the U.N. Conference is an effort by its many liberal members to accomplish through the international arena what they and other gun-control advocates have been unable to achieve domestically expanded registration and control of lawful, non-military firearms. If these nations are serious about combating illegal firearms trafficking, they should strengthen their export laws to parallel those of the United States, instead of attacking our nation's Second Amendment rights."


As a measure of how much the 2000 election mattered, consider that when the draft protocol was prepared in December 2000, it was the Colombian and Mexican delegations (!), not the American delegation, which offered optional language recognizing that some countries have legitimate traditions of sporting and other gun use.

Much of the U.S. and world media reacted with horror at the U.S. position. But the Chicago Tribune and Denver Post, newspapers which generally support gun control, did criticize the U.N. Conference for attempting to invade the rights of American citizens.

That Bolton could be criticized so severely for stating that the U.N. should not promote civilian gun prohibition is rather clear proof that that the U.N. agenda really is about gun prohibition.

The United States was denounced by the Toronto Globe & Mail (July 12), asserting that "the purpose of the U.N. initiative is not to take hunting rifles away from American good old boys. It is to stop the international trafficking of machine guns, rocket launchers and other lethal weapons."
To the contrary, the U.N. definition of "small arms" encompasses rifles and pistols. And if the U.N. conference were just about rocket launchers, the conference never would have attracted the support of the U.S. and international gun-prohibition groups or opposition of the U.S. and international gun-rights groups. Bolton in fact argued for a narrower definition, encompassing only military arms.

Besides blasting the U.S. stance, the media trotted out various factoids invented by the United Nations, such as that "small arms" kill a thousand people a day, mostly women and children. (Meaning 300,000 in war, and 200,000 from murder, suicide, and accidents.) Claims were made that half the small arms in the world today are illegally held.

Garnering far less attention were the gun-ownership facts contained in the Small Arms Survey 2001, published by the Graduate Institute of International Studies, and released for the conference. While the study was laden with pro-control advocacy, it reported that almost all small arms killing of civilians is perpetrated by organized crime, pirates/bandits, and rebel groups. Collectively, these groups possess about 900,000 guns ? only two-tenths of one percent of all the small arms in the world. Fifty-six percent of the world's 551 million small arms are held by private citizens, 41% by armies, and 3% by police forces.

In other words, in the world, as in the United States, over 99% of firearms are in the right hands. Firearms misuse is perpetrated almost exclusively by criminals who own a fraction of one percent of all the guns.

If the real objective were to reduce misuse, then nations would follow the lead of the United States, which has extremely strict laws on the export of small arms, including firearms. All firearms made or sold in the U.S. must have registration marks, allowing for tracing. The American export controls are far more rigorous than the controls of the hypocritical nations like the U.K. and Sweden, which impose near-prohibition on their own people, while turning a blind eye towards exports to terrorists and gangsters.

And as in the United States, the misuse of 2/10th of one percent is a pretext for prohibitionists to outlaw everything.

Tony Brown, Executive Director of the pro-rights Canadian Institute for Legislative Action, detailed the obvious falsity of the Kofi Annan's claim that small arms "exacerbate conflict, spark refugee flows, undermine the rule of law, and spawn a culture of violence and impunity. In short, small arms are a threat to peace and development, to democracy and human rights." Brown pointed out:

Canadians citizens own as many as 15 million small arms, one of the highest rates of private firearms ownership in the world?If the simple presence of privately owned small arms sparked violence amongst the citizenry, Canada would be bathed in blood. But it's not. Canada enjoys one of the lowest murder and violent crime rates in the world. Do firearms create international conflict? No. Canadians are privileged to share the longest undefended border in the world with our friend and partner, the United States. . . . Do the presence of so many small arms create poverty? Once again, no. The United Nations has consistently rated Canada, along with Norway and the United States, one of the best places in the world to live. Interestingly, all three countries have very high rates of civilian firearms ownership.

The conference's rhetoric about protecting "women and children" was a pretext for its dominant objective of protecting governments by disarming the governed ? as I'll detail in an upcoming column. The United Nations burns guns in giant bonfires for the same reason that the Nazis burned books in giant bonfires: because people who vigorously exercise the fundamental human rights which are recognized by First and Second Amendment are the kind of people who are difficult to for tyrants ? including a tyranny of the majority ? to control.

Read about it: Washington Times Online


July 6, 2001

Gun rights activists protest arms talks
By Betsy Pisik

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

NEW YORK ?


An outcry by American gun enthusiasts, who fear the United Nations will trample their Second Amendment rights at an upcoming gun conference, has prompted the world body to issue a statement saying it isn't so.

At least 100 letters and e-mails have been received at the U.N. headquarters in recent months, expressing "irate and strongly worded" fears over next week's international conference on small arms.

"The United Nations Charter (Article II, paragraph 7) specifically forbids the U.N. from intervening in matters that are within a member state's domestic jurisdiction," says the fact sheet.

The U.N. fact sheet also stresses that pro-hunting and firearms-safety groups such as the National Rifle Association will be participating in next week's conference, dubbed the U.N. Conference on Small Arms and Light Weapons.

None of the missives received thus far appear threatening to the United Nations or any of its officers, said U.N. Undersecretary General of Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala.

Nevertheless, since guns are involved, Mr. Dhanapala said he was taking no chances and had turned over the correspondence to U.N. security for a threat assessment.

"We have had in the weeks leading up to the conference a flow of letters and e-mails from essentially gun rights activists," Mr. Dhanapala told reporters yesterday.

He said that gun owners of other nations were apparently not concerned. "This is an American phenomenon."

Mr. Dhanapala, a disarmament expert from Sri Lanka, carefully refuted the allegations, saying, "we are not looking at the question of domestic gun control as far as crime prevention concerned. ... The legal ownership of guns is not being interfered with."

Representatives from 120 nations and 177 non-governmental organizations will gather in New York starting Monday for the two-week conference to battle the illicit trade in small arms.

The American delegation will include John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, who is slated to deliver the U.S. speech from the General Assembly podium.

American gun owners have long regarded the U.N. conference on small arms with suspicion, concerned that foreign diplomats might try to write treaties that would infringe on the U.S. constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

An Internet search of "United Nations" and "Second Amendment" turned up scores of Web sites, most of them framing the discussion as a potential assault on American sovereignty, or an attack on the right to defend self and family.

The letter and e-mail writers were apparently not part of an organized campaign, said U.N. officials, who noted that the missives appeared to be written individually.
Most of them came though a U.N. Web site that features the upcoming conference, www.un.org/events.

July 29, 2001
A stand for principle at the U.N.

Bob Barr

Read about it: Washington Times

The United Nations just concluded a conference on small arms. This conference never should have taken place; but thank goodness it took place under President Bush rather than President Clinton.

In recent weeks, the Bush administration has demonstrated a clear and welcome break from the eroding disrespect shown the Constitution during the Clinton administration. Through a series of statements and policy decisions, and in the face of left-wing criticism from the national media and international community, the new administration has stood in strong defense of law-abiding Americans' Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The new respect for and loyalty to our constitutional freedoms by President Bush comes at an important time; a time when strong leadership is needed to defend the Second Amendment against increasing attacks by the left.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the U.N. Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, as an observer member of the U.S. delegation. The disdain which many in the international community held for America's constitutional freedoms was evident immediately.

Proposals under consideration at the outset of this conference and the speeches that accompanied them sought an internationally enforced system of gun registration, the limitation of personal firearms ownership in member countries, including the United States, and an unprecedented level of power over the way America would be allowed to conduct its foreign affairs.

I firmly believe if this conference had been held just one year ago, the Second Amendment would have been subverted and the U.S. delegation would have caved, in favor of international appeasement or to curry favor with our erstwhile allies intent on diminishing freedom in their countries and whose leaders resent the freedoms enjoyed by our citizens.

Fortunately, to the surprise of many in the international community, who for the last eight years had come to expect appeasement over principle by the United States, the U.S. delegation, led by Undersecretary of State John Bolton, stood firm; refusing to bend America's constitutional principles to further the U.N.'s anti-gun agenda.

The Bush administration told the United Nations it shared the important goal of limiting violence in Third World nations, but instead of infringing on our Constitution, it would be better served encouraging these countries to adopt the same strong export controls already employed by the United States. Rather than working with us on this important, common-sense goal, the international delegates instead reacted with astonishment as to why the U.S. did not recognize, "the need to establish and retain controls on private ownership of these deadly weapons, and the need for preventing sales of such arms to non-state groups." I say to them it is because we finally have an administration that follows principle, rather than appeasement; an administration committed to a representative government, and national freedom, not a one-world government.

The repair needed to restore our Second Amendment principles is extensive, and it is a fight far from over; but thus far it has been met with a consistent and principled commitment by the Bush administration.

The Justice Department, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, recently reasserted a very basic, common-sense principle that all law-abiding citizens have the right to keep and bear arms; a principle dismissed by the Clinton-Reno Justice Department. Attorney General Ashcroft also broke from Miss Reno in supporting our right to privacy, by moving to destroy the personal records of lawful gun owners after they passed an instant background check. The House of Representatives recently supported this measure, by rejecting a proposal by Democrats to retain personal records on file in government offices for up to 90 days, after it is determined a citizen is not disqualified from purchasing a firearm.

These small, but very important measures should not go unnoticed by those who cherish our constitutional principles. The strong defense of the Second Amendment by the Bush administration is a stark contrast from the last eight years of the Clinton presidency. I commend President Bush and those in his administration for standing firm and hope this principled commitment continues in the coming years. The alternative is to relinquish our constitutional rights to delegates at the United Nations; sacrificing principle over appeasement.

While the document adopted at the U.N. Small Arms Conference should never have come up in the first place, at least it did so during the Bush presidency. Our task now is to keep sufficient light shining on the U.N. to ensure its future actions do not move us backward.


Bob Barr, Georgia Republican, is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and serves on the House Financial Services, Judiciary, and Government Reform Committees, and is a former federal prosecutor.

I take advantage of the occasion so as to warn that I'll certainly not be present anymore from now on as I will enlist myself in the French Foreign Legion on Monday, as the basic training session last 4 monthes it will be impossible for me to have Internet access during this period.

I made this "announcement" just for a matter of politeness

French Cat

Hi all,

as the one that gave me the info didn't explained exactly what role J. Bolton took at the Small Arms Conference, I made a search recently, here's what I've found:

In mid-2001 Bolton announced at the UN Conference on Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons that Washington opposed any initiative to regulate trade in small arms or in non-military rifles--or any effort that would 'abrogate the constitutional right to bear arms.'

Accompanying Bolton to the conference were members of the National Rifle Association (NRA). 'It is precisely those weapons that Bolton would exclude from the purview of this conference that are actually killing people and endangering communities around the world,' said Tamar Gabelnick, director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

She charged that the U.S. delegation, led by Arms Control Secretary Bolton, single-handedly destroyed any possibility of consensus around the Small Arms Action Plan.

many of the sites that refers to J. Bolton are mainly hoplophobic ones, I will made another search and if I find something more precise or interesting, I'll edit my post

besides, I've found an article on the Guns&Ammo 's site about this conference, quite interesting even if that's not surprising:

Global Gun Ban A Bust

In the words of a firearms prohibitionist, here's why the U.N.'s push to disarm American citizens doesn't hold water.
By Dr. Paul Gallant & Dr. Joanne Eisen


The conference did more harm than good to those fighting against the spread of small arms. Small arms proliferation must be addressed with incremental measures, not bold policy initiatives. --Laudable Failure, Aaron Karp, SAIS Review, Winter-Spring 2002

The "laudable failure" referred to by Aaron Karp was the U.N.'s "Conference On The Illegal Trade In Small Arms And Light Weapons In All its Aspects." Held in New York City in July 2001, the conference was touted as "the crowning event of a decade of political activism."

Many gun owners know that the U.S. put a temporary halt to the U.N.'s plans for global civilian disarmament. But media fanfare that accompanied the conference has camouflaged the depths of the failure Karp described.
 

"[T]he outcome could hardly have been worse for those who believe that small arms proliferation is a serious challenge for international peace and security. . . It is no exaggeration to say that efforts to deal with the issue would be more aggressive today if the conference had never taken place.

"Even worse than the underwhelming final document," Karp lamented, "was the climate of hopelessness it left behind."

The most palpable aspect of the debacle was Under-Secretary of State John Bolton, who vigorously represented the U.S. at the conference and refused to accede to the "visionary proposals" that would eventually strip us of our firearms. But according to Karp, "[e]ven without Bolton's fireworks," the conference was doomed, and "the outcome would have been much the same."

Aaron Karp is Senior Consultant to the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research project that maintains that small arms "are made to maim and kill" and "have imperiled [sic] human security in every way." Karp's political allies are in dire straits. His insightful assessment of the state of the global anti-gun community should give U.S. gun owners refreshing encouragement in the never-ending fight to secure a safer world for our children.

The hidden goal of the conference was to create long-term international pressure for severe restrictions to be placed on the possession and use of firearms by the world's civilians, but especially by American gun owners. Controlling our firearms is crucial to the U.N.'s agenda. Of a total estimated 638 million firearms on this planet, about 375 million firearms are in private hands. Of the 250 million guns in America, 98 percent of these--245 million--are privately owned. Looking at it a different way, about 65 percent of the world's stockpile of privately held firearms are in the hands of U.S. civilians. If the Bush administration had caved, that would have gone a long way toward furthering the U.N. goal of global civilian disarmament. But Bush and Bolton stood firm.

The Conference presented the global gun-banners with insurmountable hurdles. For one thing, many countries have become justifiably leery of the U.N.'s propensity for filching bits and pieces of their sovereignty; Bolton was only "joining in the global tidal wave of sovereign reassertion."

Add to that the growing admission and acceptance by firearm prohibitionists that the black market is intractable, wishes and dreams can never control it, and that human nature itself will ensure its survival--the best-laid plans of lawmakers notwithstanding.

Consequently, "There was no agreement [at the Conference] on whose guns were culpable or how to restrain their use."

But what had become irrefutable is that past social policies premised on civilian disarmament have proven disastrous. "The small arms issue rose from a broad desire to do something to ease the carnage of global crime, ethnic strife and secessionist warfare," and that philosophy has failed spectacularly. Where the U.N. has been in control, and where disarmament has been attempted, increased violence has often been the result, contrary to all promises.

For example, the U.N. sent peacekeeping troops to northwestern Cambodia in 1992 to disarm warring factions. The operation was deemed to have achieved only "limited success." Nevertheless, between 25 to 50 percent of the combatants were believed to have been disarmed. A study conducted after the departure of the U.N. peacekeeping force found that firearm-related injuries increased, relative to the level existing prior to U.N. intervention.

In Bosnia in 1995 more than 7,500 men and boys were massacred in the border town of Srebrenica following a U.N. embargo on arms into the region and peacekeeping efforts based on demilitarized "safe areas." The massacre has been called the worst in post-World War II Europe.

Civilian disarmament has never achieved its stated goal. It's difficult for those who would ban firearms to accept that, in the U.K., what started out as a glorious moral policy of arms reduction turned into a less-than-glorious social disaster for all to see.

With all semblance of a moral underpinning gone from the philosophy of civilian disarmament, what remains is the ugly reality that disarmament doesn't make for a safer world. Instead, it renders innocent people victims.

What has replaced the optimism of the global gun-banners is the fear that they may well have "triggered a response from gun advocates. . . [and] small-arms activists [read: prohibitionists] must contend with organized opposition."

Is this the death knell of the global disarmament crowd? Not by a long shot, for even when forced to confront the failure of their philosophy, they persist in their lethal agenda. "Progress toward this goal will come exclusively through incremental steps. . .it has to include those small arms already in public hands. . ."

The global firearm prohibitionists will simply not let go of their warped "vision of society in which small arms have a progressively less visible role. . ." As Karp noted, "the issue was permanently logged on the global agenda," and "the small arms community must bide its time..." He continued, gun-banning "small arms activists will have to reinvent their work, adapting to an environment requiring enormous dedication and determination while accepting slow results. . ."

Finally, Karp let the cat out of the bag when he stated, "Gun advocates have long spoken as if there were an international conspiracy to get rid of their guns. Perhaps it is time for advocates of restraint to become more as they are described."

We are forewarned: "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."