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Editor’s
note: This
is the fifth installment in an NRO series on the United Nations
Conference on Small Arms (the previous installment: #4).
  his
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. João 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."
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