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U.N.'s Real Gun Agenda Emerges
Lawrence Auster
Tuesday, July 10, 2001
The official name of the meeting taking place at the U.N. General Assembly this week and next is the "United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects."
The portentous-sounding phrase "illicit trade in small arms and light weapons" is worth repeating, because the conference speakers themselves keep endlessly repeating it, word for word like a mystical mantra, along with impassioned calls for the worldwide elimination of small arms and light weapons. Spoken so often, the words began to have an almost hypnotic effect. But what do they really mean? What is this conference really after? The first day offered troubling clues.
Over and over the delegates described small arms and light weapons in the direst terms. The delegate from Mozambique called such weapons nothing less than a "threat to humanity." Not only that, but they are responsible for "poverty, backwardness, and a lack of democracy," and are "an obstacle to a country's development."
Several delegates made the point — were they all reading from the same crib sheet? — that more than 500 million small arms are circulating, one for every 12 human beings in the world. Another speaker said that every year the number of casualties from small arms and light weapons is greater than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What this means, he said, is that small arms and light weapons are "weapons of mass destruction" and must be dealt with accordingly. Truly, to stop such a plague, it would seem that the most rigorous measures are called for.
Deer Hunting With a Weapon of Mass Destruction
But before we rush ahead with this program to save humanity, what exactly are these "small arms" that the humanitarians want to eliminate? According to the U.N.'s own Web site:
"Small arms are weapons designed for personal use, while light weapons are designed for use by several persons serving as a crew. Examples of small arms include revolvers and self-loading pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns, assault rifles and light machine-guns. Light weapons include heavy machine-guns, some types of grenade launchers, portable anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, and portable launchers of anti-aircraft missile systems."
In other words, revolvers and rifles are weapons of mass destruction! By this logic, criminal acts in the U.S. involving handguns pose the same order of danger to mankind as the hydrogen bomb, and require the type of global solution that U.N. bureaucrats are most eager to provide. The long-term aim seems to be a worldwide system of gun control, as suggested by a delegate from the European Union who said that the convention's non-binding draft Program of Action is only a "point of departure" for a much larger scheme.
"It should be our goal to achieve agreement ... on all aspects of how to combat small arms and light weapons." The goal, he said, is "a world free from illicit traffic in small arms and light weapons that have caused so much suffering."
As this reference to "illicit" kept being made over and over, I wondered, if illicit arms must be eliminated, why not licit weapons as well? Why should legal arms that used to harm civilians be of any less concern than arms traded illegally?
The answer came soon enough from the morning's most aggressive speaker, Foreign Minister Jozias van Artsen of the Netherlands. Van Artsen hinted where he was heading when he changed the formulaic phrase "the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons" to "the uncontrolled trade in small arms and light weapons." Stopping this uncontrolled traffic, he said, is not enough. We must further regulate the legal trade in arms to prevent spillover to the illegal arms trade.
He then praised the systematic destruction of weapons that has been carried out by several countries and urged an expansion of such programs. The inescapable implication of van Artsen's words is that he wants to see the physical destruction of all small weapons in the world — or rather, the destruction of all small weapons not owned by government.
Van Artsen, ominously, received the strongest applause of any speaker during the first morning of the conference.
A Voice of Sanity
The only speaker who stood against this globalist tide — indeed, the only speaker who used logical arguments instead of ritualistic phrases aimed at manipulating people's emotions — was U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton. While agreeing that stopping illicit traffic in small arms and light weapons is a worthy goal, Bolton noted that small arms and light weapons "in our understanding are military weapons. We separate them from hunting rifles and pistols that are privately owned."
The U.S., he continued, does not begin by presuming that all small arms and light weapons are problematic. It is illicit trade in military weapons that are at issue — a radically different position from Van Artsen's implied view that it is the legal trade in personal weapons that must be eliminated.
The U.S. already has effective enforcement programs in this area, said Bolton. To be traded, weapons of U.S. origin must meet certain criteria for responsible use. "The U.S. government has stopped many exports of weapons that did not meet these criteria. We hope the Program of Action will encourage all countries to adopt similar measures. They should be directed at areas of instability and conflict."
In other words, unlike the rest of the U.N. that seeks an indiscriminate global solution to the problem, the U.S. urges more modest and directed efforts by member nations themselves to stop illegal activities over which they themselves have proper responsibility and control.
Bolton made another very powerful point, that the distinction between "government" and "non-government" is irrelevant as far as the responsible use of arms is concerned. In many cases it is governments that are the criminal force from which citizens and freedom fighters need to defend themselves — a self-defense that that would become impossible if only governments were allowed to buy and own weapons.
Though the possibility never enters the heads of the liberals and socialists who see the state as the source of all good, the reality is that government — specifically the government misuse of legal weapons — was the dominant fact in 20th century inhumanity. As Richard Poe writes in his new book "The Seven Myths of Gun Control," more than 170 million unarmed men, women and children were killed by armed governments in the course of the 20th century. This excludes the deaths of soldiers in combat, which came to the much smaller figure of 38.5 million.
So far the Bush administration is standing bravely alone against the U.N.'s sinister agenda to strip the peoples of the world of the ability to defend themselves from tyranny and violence. Will the American position continue to be based on the firm principles and clear thinking shown by John Bolton, or will it turn out to be, like most contemporary conservatism, a mere exercise in foot-dragging? This conference may give us the answer.
Lawrence Auster can be reached at lawrence.auster@att.net.
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