Post by peterd on Jul 15, 2012 5:19:39 GMT -8
For much of the past two weeks, I’ve been attending the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty conference in New York and blogging on the craziness of Turtle Bay. A number of comments on my blogs—and many external commentators—have raised the question of whether the ATT is, pure and simple, a “gun grab” treaty.
Let’s start with three basic points:
1.No external power, and certainly not the U.N., can disarm U.S. citizens or deprive us of our Second Amendment rights by force. If there is a Second Amendment problem, it comes from the actions of U.S. authorities.
2.The U.N. and many of its member states are hostile to the private ownership of firearms.
3.The U.S. is exceptional: It is one of the few nations that has a constitutional provision akin to the Second Amendment.
Thus, the default U.N. tendency—partly out of malevolence, partly out of ignorance—is to act in ways contrary to the Second Amendment, and the fundamental job of the U.S. at the U.N. is to try to stop bad things from happening. The alternative of completely quitting the entire U.N. is appealing but unwise, because the U.N. would keep doing things that would affect the U.S. even if we were not in it.
blog.heritage.org/2012/07/13/the-u-n-arms-trade-treaty-and-the-second-amendment/
Let’s start with three basic points:
1.No external power, and certainly not the U.N., can disarm U.S. citizens or deprive us of our Second Amendment rights by force. If there is a Second Amendment problem, it comes from the actions of U.S. authorities.
2.The U.N. and many of its member states are hostile to the private ownership of firearms.
3.The U.S. is exceptional: It is one of the few nations that has a constitutional provision akin to the Second Amendment.
Thus, the default U.N. tendency—partly out of malevolence, partly out of ignorance—is to act in ways contrary to the Second Amendment, and the fundamental job of the U.S. at the U.N. is to try to stop bad things from happening. The alternative of completely quitting the entire U.N. is appealing but unwise, because the U.N. would keep doing things that would affect the U.S. even if we were not in it.
blog.heritage.org/2012/07/13/the-u-n-arms-trade-treaty-and-the-second-amendment/