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Editor’s
note: This
is the fourth installment in an NRO series on the United Nations
Conference on Small Arms (the previous installment: #3).
 t
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
Konaré 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.
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