Standing Guard: The First Step In Trampling Our Rights

Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President

Saturday, January 23, 2010

With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's enthusiastic embrace of a "binding" United Nations treaty on global control of international trade in firearms and ammunition, the Obama administration has officially become an aggressive participant in what international gun-ban groups have hailed as a "first step" in their march on our sovereignty and ultimately on private ownership of firearms in every nation.

In announcing the radical shift in U.S. policy, Clinton proclaimed, "The United States is committed to actively pursuing a strong and robust treaty that contains the highest possible, legally binding standards for the international transfer of conventional weapons."

In her terse statement, Clinton did not mention the Second Amendment or U.S. sovereignty. Her silence on those seminal elements of our freedom stands in stark contrast to the audacious defense of American liberty by President George W. Bush under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton.

"The administration is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there's no doubt--as was the case back over a decade ago--that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control."

Bolton stunned the United Nations' gun-ban machine in July 2001 by announcing fundamental opposition to any binding global civil disarmament treaty, proclaiming, "We do not support measures that prohibit civilian possession of small arms. . . .The United States will not join consensus on a final document that contains measures abrogating the constitutional right to bear arms."

Bolton's bold presence at that key U.N. gun-ban conference continued with his role as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.--giving Americans eight years of safety from global attacks on our Second Amendment rights.

The world gun-ban axis, created and funded by globalist billionaire George Soros, was outraged. But they were beaten. For eight years the U.N. and Soros' International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) were held at bay by the Bush administration's adamant stand.

But with the election of Barack Obama and his appointment of Hillary Clinton, the Bush/Bolton doctrine to protect American liberty evaporated.

President Obama's political mantra of "hope and change" has morphed into a very real threat. Obama's deep curtsy to international arms control has given "hope" to the international gun-ban crowd that they will prevail.

Rebecca Peters, George Soros' protege on the global gun-ban stage, is gleeful. On the IANSA website she proclaims: "Around the world people are suffering because the legal gun market is poorly regulated, allowing these deadly weapons to be misused, whether by police, criminals, terrorists or in the home. Governments must now implement these global principles in order to protect their citizens from the flood of guns.

"The principles . . . prohibit inter-national transfers where the arms are likely to be used in serious human rights violations.

"This is also the focus of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). . . ."

Details of the Obama/Clinton- endorsed treaty--which has not yet been finalized--will surely include international monitoring and control of every aspect of firearm commerce and ownership in the United States.

Ambassador Bolton recently explained in an NRA interview, "The administration is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there's no doubt--as was the case back over a decade ago--that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control.

"Many of the implications of these treaty negotiations are very much in their domestic application. So, whatever the appearance on the surface, there's no doubt that domestic firearm control is right at the top of their agenda."

Literally all of the international gun confiscation groups couch their renewed U.N. treaty efforts in terms of what they call "human rights." But in the newspeak lexicon of the U.N., "human rights" doesn't mean the right to self-defense as we know it.

With the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Heller decision upholding the Second Amendment and declaring the District of Columbia's ban on armed self-defense in the home unconstitutional, Americans are now acutely aware of this essential individual human right.

Armed self-defense by individual Americans is equally the heart of the Constitutional challenge to Chicago's gun-ban law now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court--a landmark case with essential support from the NRA among a broad coalition of Second Amendment forces.

But armed self-defense by private citizens--of any nation--is specifically not a "human right" under the U.N. charter.

Try this from a key July 2007 report to the U.N.'s Human Rights Council entitled, "Specific Human Rights Issues--Prevention of human rights violations committed with small arms and light weapons." The IANSA-inspired official U.N. report--shamefully written by an American professor, Barbara Frey, director of the Human Rights Program in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota--argues: "Self-defence is sometimes designated as a 'right.' There is inadequate legal support for such an interpretation. . . . No international human right of self-defence is expressly set forth in the primary sources of international law: treaties, customary law or general principles. . . . International law does not support an international legal obligation requiring States to permit access to a gun for self-defence."

In fact, under the United Nations' charter the report declares, "The right of self-defence in international law is not directed toward the preservation of lives of individuals . . . it is concerned with the preservation of the State."

That is stunning. So there you have it. This is the heart, the essence of the United Nations attack on our Second Amendment and our sovereignty.

No matter what the gun-ban crowd says, any U.N. arms treaty boils down to one thing: The power of the American people--of individuals--is crushed by the power of the international super-state.

Each of us must work to stop this bowing and scraping by the Obama administration to those evil principles.

Write, call, e-mail and meet with your elected representatives to deliver a simple message: No U.N. arms treaty--not under any circumstance or for any reason--not now, not ever! "The administration is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international trade between nations, but there's no doubt ... that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control."