THE UNITED NATIONS WANTS TO DISARM Americans and other gun owners around the world. No, this is not some wild claim cooked up by the fevered imaginations of militia crazies. For the past couple of years, three different U.N. agencies — the U.N. Disarmament Commission, the U.N. Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms, and the U.N. Economic and Social Council’s Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice have been holding meetings to devise policies to control “light weapons.”
Ostensibly, these agencies are hoping to limit the “illicit” international trade in handguns, rifles, and other small arms. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, they have concluded that the way to crack down on the illicit trade is to keep law-abiding people from owning firearms. This, of course, mirrors the arguments of gun-control advocates in the United States, who it turns out are working hand-in-glove with the U.N. bureaucrats on these initiatives. ” The constant rhetoric you hear in the U.N. is that the availability of firearms causes crime,” says Tom Mason of the National Rifle Association. Yet U.S. studies clearly show that states with the highest per capita gun ownership — Vermont for one — generally have the lowest crime rates.
Now, it may be a good thing to prevent weapons from flowing into countries undergoing civil war — Rwanda, say, or Bosnia — but the U.N. and gun- control advocates have misidentified the problem. Take Afghanistan. That country is an armed camp not because some greedy gun-runners sold weapons to Afghan citizens; it’s an armed camp because the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States supplied armaments to their respective allies in that country. Besides, guns didn’t cause the Afghan civil war, the Soviet invasion did. And in most of the world’s civil conflicts today, the vast majority of the weapons are supplied by governments pursuing what they believe to be their interests. Hunters and sport shooters are simply not part of the equation.
As creatures of government, U.N. functionaries do not accept or respect the principle that gun ownership might be a citizen’s right. The Second Amendment guarantee of an American citizen’s right to keep and bear arms is beyond fathoming by U.N. officials whose governments essentially want to figure out how best to control and disarm their citizens. “We consider personal defense to be a basic universal right,” says Mason. “They do not.” Instead, the U.N. ‘s gun-controllers argue that citizens should rely solely on their governments for personal protection and blandly advise that “all States should improve the safety and security of their societies, so their citizens would not see the necessity to arm themselves.”
The most troubling of the three initiatives is the “U.N. Declaration of Principles for the Regulation of Firearms” being devised by the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. The working draft declares that “no State can be left immune from the effect of the lack or laxity of legislative and administrative control of firearms of other States.” It goes on to say: ” The absence of effective firearm regulation in one Member State can undermine not only the regulatory efforts but also the effective governance of other Member States.”
Decoding the U.N.-speak, the declaration is claiming that countries which restrict the ownership of firearms are threatened by countries in which citizens have a right to own guns. The implied solution is global gun control — international standards for the regulation of firearms. Indeed, the draft declaration recommends: “The acquisition and possession of firearms and ammunition would always require a license granted by an authority.” It further recommends that “a system for firearms registration to record information on serial number and other markings of the firearms legally imported and sold to citizens, or reported lost/stolen, should be domestically/internationally harmonized. That is, there is a need for centralizing and computerization of information in a standardized manner to facilitate further criminal investigations and to determine the responsibility of owners.”
Simply put, the declaration is calling for global gun licensing and registration. But this would be only the first step. International gun- control advocacy groups that are advising the U.N. commission want much more.
According to the NRA’s Mason, the main supporters of the declaration are Japan and Canada. “Japan is supplying the money and Canada is supplying the brains,” he says. The leading non-governmental organization pushing the U.N. initiatives is a leftist arms-control group, the British American Security Information Council, based in Washington and London. With the help of a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, the council is expanding its old military arms-control agenda with a new Project on Light Weapons. They define “light weapons” as including “pistols, revolvers, rifles and machine guns.”
In a report for the group, deputy director Natalie Goldring outlines its plans for domestic and international control of light weapons. First, Goldring derides the National Rifle Association and other U.S. gunowners groups for being paranoid about the global firearms initiatives: “Unlike the NRA, which apparently sees the U.N. efforts as an international conspiracy led by Japan and Canada, Gun Owners of America sees the United Nations as a front for domestic gun control in the United States.” But only a few paragraphs later she blithely declares: “It will be difficult to control the international light weapons trade without monitoring and controlling domestic access to weapons.”
Goldring goes on to suggest what measures would be needed to “make the connections between domestic gun control and international gun control.” Among them are the creation of “subregional, regional, and global weapons registers” and “greater oversight of existing national control and enforcement mechanisms, harmonizing national measures in bilateral, regional, and global frameworks; and/or enhancing national policies.” Can there be any doubt that “enhancing national policies” is to gun control what “revenue enhancing” is to tax increases?
Goldring singles out the United States for opprobrium, declaring that “the direct relationship between lax U.S. gun laws and illicit trafficking in U.S. weapons suggests that to control light weapons internationally, it will be necessary to control them nationally. It will be diffcult, if not impossible, to control the illicit market in light weapons without monitoring and controlling domestic access to weapons.” As the old saying goes, “Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”
Does it really matter what the U.N. decides about regulating firearms? It may matter a great deal. Consider the recent U.N. treaty to ban landmines. The United States participated in all of the landmine negotiations, trying to make the point that while mines do cause considerable harm to civilians, they are essential to protecting American troops, especially along the DMZ in Korea. The United States asked for an exemption in that case but was simply ignored. In the end, President Clinton uncharacteristically resisted enormous political pressure from arms-control groups and refused to sign the landmine treaty.
The U.N. Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice plans to submit its Declaration of Principles for the Regulation of Firearms to the U. N. General Assembly later this year, where it will almost certainly be hailed as an advance for civilization. It would then be a short and predictable step for gun-control activists to urge turning the declaration into a U.N. Convention on Firearms Regulations — with which U.S. politicians could be bludgeoned, as they have been on landmines. This is why the NRA’s Tom Mason insists, “We have a damn good reason to make a big deal out of this U.N. gun- control effort.”
Nonetheless, gunowners and sport shooters are playing catchup. Earlier this year, the NRA and more than 20 gunowner and sport shooter organizations from 12 countries formed the World Forum on the Future of Sports Shooting Activities to counterbalance the U.N. bureaucracies. Meantime, the United States has sent official representatives from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Treasury Department, and Customs to U.N. negotiating sessions on the Declaration of Principles. Their participation simply lends credibility to a process that threatens to erode the rights of American citizens. It should stop.
Ronald Bailey is a freelance writer and television producer in Washington, D.C.
