Secretary Bolton's forthright declarations, delivered to the "U.N. Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All its Aspects" on July 9, 2001, dramatically derailed the anti-gun agenda of the gun prohibitionist crowd- international and domestic.
Unfortunately, seven years have passed, and those same foes of freedom believe that now they are back on track. They are energized as never before by the change a Barack Obama administration would mean for their campaign for civilian disarmament. This is a major reason why Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, who has used his vast fortune to bankroll gun control schemes around the globe, has been financially backing Obama since his U.S. Senate run.
As NRA members know, Soros and his Open Society Institute (OSI) have channeled boxcars of cash to anti-gun groups and have supported the U.N.'s well-organized attack on firearm ownership and even the right to self-defense. Soros and his U.N. friends no doubt applaud Obama's arrogant dismissal of Washington, D.C., residents' right to self-defense, even if the U.S. Supreme Court failed to agree.
When Soros and OSI decided to start major funding of anti-gun research and advocacy, they searched for an experienced activist to guide the effort. Soros hired Rebecca Peters, a central figure in disarming the people of Australia, and a leader in the effort to ban all privately owned handguns.
After Peters successfully brought a long gun ban to Australia, she began targeting handguns. She finally unveiled her total distrust of gun owners, willingly confessing that her long gun ban was really aimed at sporting guns and collectibles. "The fact that many civilians owned self-loading or semi-automatic rifles and shotguns for the purpose of sport did not make those guns suitable for civilian ownership-it just meant a lot of unsuitable guns were in circulation," she wrote. She bragged that her ban confiscated nearly 700,000 firearms "to be melted down into soup cans and bus-stop benches."
Peters runs the International Action Network Against Small Arms (IANSA), the organization the U.N. uses "to coordinate civil society involvement to the U.N. small arms process." The U.N.-just like Barack Obama-claims it has no agenda to control lawful gun ownership, but Peters is brutally honest.
Peters writes that the topic of regulating civilian gun sales was removed from the U.N.'s Programme of Action (POA) in 2001 "at the insistence of the United States (and its National Rifle Association), [but] even though the POA contains no specific reference to regulation of civilian small arms, such regulation is implied because it is necessary for the effective implementation of the agreement."
It is high time for Barack Obama to comment honestly on U.N. actions- past, present and future-that concern our Second Amendment rights. But, before he dresses up in camo and starts his canned "I support hunters" speech, I hope he'll check out IANSA's website, where the gun banners gloat over Uruguay's recent destruction of thousands of firearms. The majority of those guns were "gathered" from the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fishing. Peters' group boasts that this was "the country's first destruction of weapons previously used for hunting and sports."
"Soros to Peters to Obama" may not sound like "Tinker to Evans to Chance," but an Obama administration sympathetic to the U.N. anti-gun agenda would form a deadly double-play combination for American gun owners. Don't forget that when the U.N. war against lawfully owned firearms was gathering steam in the early 1990s, it drew support from the Clinton administration. The fact that U.N. bureaucrats have not been able to rapidly advance their war on our rights during the past seven years has only whetted their appetite for what George Soros would call a "regime change." They are looking to return a friendly face to the White House on November 4, and their candidate for change is Barack Obama.
Remarks by Sen. Mitch McConnell at NRA's "Celebration of American Values" Conference
Last September, the U.S. Senate minority leader commented on the U.N.'s gun ban campaign at NRA's gathering in Washington, D.C. Sen. McConnell's remarks are excerpted here:
"The U.N. Humans Rights Council couldn't be more wrongly named. The United States, of course, is not a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council, but countries like Cuba, China and Saudi Arabia are. The Human Rights Council Subcomission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights last year endorsed a report titled 'Prevention of Human Rights Violations Committed With Small Arms and Light Weapons.' If just hearing that title makes you nervous for what the U.N. has concocted, go to the head of the class.
"In America, owning a gun is a fundamental right. But this U.N. report states that insufficient gun control is a violation of human rights. Yes, according to the U.N. report, countries that don't enforce gun control strictly enough are violating the human rights of their people. The right to defend yourself doesn't give you the right to use a gun, according to the bureaucrats at the U.N. Let me read a sentence from the report. This is what they had to say: 'The principle of self-defense has an important place in international human rights law, but does not provide an independent supervening right to small arms possession, nor does it ameliorate the duty of states to use due diligence in regulating civilian possession.' That's the U.N. Pretty scary, isn't it?
"Luckily, we live in a country where the right to bear arms is woven into the founding documents, even if some elected officials refuse to acknowledge the plain text of the Constitution.
"America has been around a lot longer than the U.N., and we owe our existence to an armed and vigilant citizenry which rose up against tyranny. Two hundred years later, I have good news to report to you all: In the battle to preserve our freedoms, we are still winning, [but] we can't rest on the successes of the past.
"Thanks to you, America does not follow the lead of Canada, and certainly not the U.N., when it comes to protecting gun rights. Instead, we follow the lead of our founders and of our Constitution. Grassroots groups like the NRA are fundamental to protecting our constitutional liberties. Thank you, and God bless America."
Further Reading
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre's book, The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the U.N. Plan to Destroy the Bill of Rights, is available at www.nrastore.com-just click on "NRA Library" for more information.
In addition, an article by David Kopel, Paul Gallant and Joanne D. Eisen on "The Human Right of Self-Defense" in the Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law, details some of the U.N.'s activities against domestic gun ownership and may be accessed at: http://davekopel.org/2A/LawRev/The-Human-Right-of-Self-Defense.pdf
