Posts Tagged ‘Arms Treaty’

International gun banners pulling out all stops at UN

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

Original Story Via: TheGunMag.comUN Olympics Gun Control Flyer

By Dave Workman

Senior Editor

The gloves have come off at the United Nations as negotiations over the proposed global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) are moving toward a climax, and two leading gun rights advocates on the scene are convinced treaty proponents want to include small arms and ammunition in the document, and slip around the Second Amendment.

Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, told TGM that, “Some movement in our direction is anticipated, but it will not be enough to make a difference. These would be minor modifications to placate us, but they will not be enough to address the concerns of American gun owners.”

“This is a blatant attempt to negate the recent Second Amendment court victories we’ve had in the United States, and to get around Second Amendment protections,” he asserted.

His wife, Julianne Versnel, said the ATT “is, in essence, an attempt by the rest of the world to impose their view of civilian firearms ownership on us, and negate the Second Amendment.”

They are at the UN representing the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Second Amendment Foundation and the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (IAPCAR). Both helped create IAPCAR, which now has member organizations around the world.

A coalition of global gun control organizations is pushing for the most extreme language and tenets in the treaty, which is supposed to be signed this week. That group includes International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) and Oxfam International and Control Arms. The latter group is apparently responsible for a handout depicting their vision of the treaty provisions highlighted in Olympics-style rings.

Ominously, two of those items are “Arms and Bullets” and “Global Standards Over National Views.” The former alludes to privately owned firearms, and the latter is a veiled but direct threat to the Second Amendment, Gottlieb said.

Various gun rights organizations have been lobbying against this treaty for weeks. If the Obama administration signs it, the document must still be ratified by the U.S. Senate, and after intense lobbying by the National Rifle Association, that doesn’t seem likely.

But with less than four months to go before the national elections, Barack Obama is painting himself into an ever-tightening corner with American gun owners. That represents a significant and influential voting bloc, and a global gun control treaty could easily push many undecided voters into the Romney camp.

Int’l gun control lobby sets sights on ammo, 2A at United Nations

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

Original Story Via: Dave Workman, Seattle Gun Rights Examiner

UN Olympics Gun Control Flyer

UN Olympics Gun Control Flyer

The gloves are definitely off at the United Nations as negotiations continue over the proposed global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), where Bellevue’s Alan Gottlieb and Julianne Versnel are raising alarms about a handout distributed Thursday morning by Control Arms, one of the gun control groups pressing for the most extreme provisions.

They say global gun control proponents are directly targeting small arms and ammunition – including civilian-owned rifles, shotguns and handguns – and the Second Amendment. With a layout deliberately designed to mimic the Olympic rings, the handout specifies “Arms and Bullets” and “Global Standards Over National Views.”

The latter, they suggest, is a thinly-veiled reference to world gun control regardless of what the U.S. Constitution might say.

Gottlieb and Versnel are in New York representing the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Second Amendment Foundation and the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (IAPCAR).

Versnel supplied Examiner with the image above that makes it clear the gun ban crowd – a coalition which includes the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) and Oxfam International – are after small arms and ammunition.

In a telephone interview, Versnel made it clear what that means.

“The ATT is, in essence, an attempt by the rest of the world to impose their view of civilian firearms ownership on us, and negate the Second Amendment,” she said.

Negotiators recessed Thursday morning but were to resume in the afternoon. Gottlieb said there are “rumors” that a slightly revised document, discussed by this column yesterday and posted on the IAPCAR website, might be introduced.

“Some movement in our direction is anticipated,” he said, “but it will not be enough to make a difference. These would be minor modifications to placate us, but they will not be enough to address the concerns of American gun owners.”

Gottlieb’s bottom line: “This is a blatant attempt to negate the recent Second Amendment court victories we’ve had in the United States, and to get around Second Amendment protections.”

Various gun rights organizations have been lobbying against this treaty for weeks. If the Obama administration signs it, the document must still be ratified by the U.S. Senate, and after intense lobbying by the National Rifle Association, that doesn’t seem likely.

But with less than four months to go before the national elections, Barack Obama is painting himself into an ever-tightening corner with gun owners. As this column noted earlier, he is “out of the closet” as a gun control proponent, even hinting at renewed focus on so-called “assault weapons.”

Unfortunately for gun prohibitionists, the proverbial horse has left the barn on that subject. With millions of semiautomatic rifles and shotguns now in circulation, banning them is out of the question unless the president thinks he can charm gun owners into surrendering them.

In that, the president and the United Nations are in the same leaky boat, with a gun rights tidal wave coming right at them.

UN gun control treaty will reveal gun laws Obama really supports

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

Original Story Via:  / FoxNews.com

Sometime later this week, the UN will finally unveil its Arms Trade Treaty. The exact date the treaty will be released is a secret.

Russia, China, France — with its new Socialist government — Britain and the Obama administration are writing the treaty behind closed doors. Yet even if the final treaty is being kept under wraps, we still have a pretty good idea of some of the requirements that will be in it.

The group writing the treaty is not promising. Russia and Britain ban handguns and many other types of weapons. The possession of guns for self-defense is completely prohibited in China. The Obama administration is undoubtedly the most hostile administration to gun ownership in US history, with Obama having personally supported bans of handguns and semi-automatic weapons before becoming president. And remember the recent scandal where the Obama administration was caught allowing guns go to Mexican drug gangs, hoping it would help push for gun control laws.

The treaty seems unlikely to ever receive the two-thirds majority necessary to be ratified by the US Senate, but that doesn’t mean it still won’t have consequences for Americans. In other countries with parliamentary systems, even if the relatively conservative parties oppose approval, ratification is just a matter of time until a left-wing government takes power. Reduced private gun ownership around the world will surely lead to more pressure for gun control in our own country.

The treaty officially aims to prevent rebels and terrorist groups from getting hold of guns. The treaty claims that at least 250,000 people die each year from armed conflicts and that the vast majority of deaths arise from so-called “small arms” — machine guns, rifles, and handguns.

Regulations of private ownership will supposedly prevent rebels and terrorist groups from getting ahold of guns. But governments, not private individuals, are the sources for these weapons. For example, the FARC fighting in Colombia get their guns from the Venezuelan government.

The most likely regulations to be pushed by the UN treaty are those that have been the favorites of American gun control advocates for years — registration and licensing, micro-stamping ammunition, and restrictions on the private transfers of guns. Unfortunately, these measures have a long history of failure and primarily just inconvenience and disarm law-abiding gun owners.

Gun registration and licensing are pushed as a way to trace those who supply these illicit weapons. Yet, to see the problem with these regulations, one only needs to look at how ineffective they have been in solving crime. Canada just recently ended its long gun registry as it was a colossal waste of money.

Beginning in 1998, Canadians spent a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a registry for long guns — in the US, the same amount per gun owner would come to $67 billion. For all that money, the registry was never credited with solving a single murder. Instead, it became an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from traditional policing activities.

Gun control advocates have long claimed registration is a safety issue. Their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun is left at a crime scene, and it was registered to the person who committed the crime, the registry will link it back to the criminal.

Unfortunately, it rarely works out this way. Criminals are seldom stupid enough to leave behind crime guns that are registered to themselves.

From 2003 to 2009, there were 4,257 homicides in Canada, 1,314 of which were committed with firearms. Data provided last fall by the Library of Parliament reveal that murder weapons were recovered in less than a third of the homicides with firearms. About three-quarters of the identified weapons were unregistered. Of the weapons that were registered, about half were registered to someone other than the person accused of the homicide.

In only 62 cases — that is, nine per year, or about 1 percent of all homicides in Canada — was the gun registered to the accused. Even in these cases, the registry did not appear to have played an important role in finding the killer. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case.

Note that the Canadian data provided above cover all guns, including handguns. It isn’t just the long-gun registry — there is also no evidence that Canada’s handgun registry, started in 1934, has ever been important in solving a single homicide.

Micro-stamping involves putting unique codes on a bullet. The most commonly discussed method is to have a special etching that is on the tip of a firing pin, the piece of metal that strikes a bullet and sets off the explosion, that will leave a mark on the bullet casing. The notion then is that if the casing is left a crime scene, the bullet can be traced back to the owner of the gun. The problem is that firing pins can easily be replaced or altered.

As to restrictions on the private transfers of guns, the most common type of regulation involves background checks. Yet, whether one is talking about the Brady Act or the so-called gun show loophole, economists and criminologists who have looked at this simply don’t find evidence that such regulations reduce crime and may even increase it. Indeed, as the surges in murder rates after gun bans in the US and around the world show, such regulations don’t stop criminals from getting guns. A huge percentage of violent crime in the US is drug gang related, and just as those gangs can bring in the illegal drugs, they can bring in the weapons that they use to protect that valuable property.

The treaty will give Americans yet another insight into the types of gun control laws that President Obama really supports. The good news is that the US Senate will almost certainly prevent him from getting the treaty adopted here. Most rest of the world won’t be so lucky.

A sneaky way to control guns: UN treaty could curtail our rights

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

Original Story Via:  / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Gun-control advocates and the Obama administration are rushing to complete negotiations in New York on a proposed international agreement called the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.

They hope to finish the drafting within weeks, perhaps having a document ready for signature so that President Obama could press a lame-duck Senate to ratify it after our Nov. 6 elections.

Because these UNATT negotiations had long escaped serious media attention, many Americans are only now learning about their disturbing direction.

Gun-control groups, frustrated by years of failing to impose harsh measures on American firearms owners, have pursued a covert strategy. Instead of constant defeats in Congress and local legislatures, they instead shifted their attention to the international realm, hoping to achieve by indirection what they had consistently failed to do at home.

Ostensibly, UNATT is about regulating government-to-government arms transfers or direct sales by manufacturers to foreign governments. But the hidden agenda of the gun controllers is to craft treaty language that, while seemingly innocuous, has long-range implications for the use and ownership of guns here in America.

The real danger lies in vague, ambiguous stipulations gun-control advocates could later cite as requiring further domestic restraints. In other words, they hope to use restrictions on international gun sales to control gun sales at home.

Indeed, the theme underlying the negotiations is that the private ownership of guns is inherently dangerous.

There is, of course, little doubt why dictatorships and authoritarian regimes don’t want their oppressed citizens to have weapons — but such positions do not merit American support.

There are compelling arguments for closely monitoring foreign sales of truly military weapons such as machine guns, crew-served mortars and shoulder-fired missiles. Keeping such arms out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists is, beyond dispute, in our national interest.

But the United States already has a strong regulatory regime under the Arms Export Control Act to license the export of American-made weapons.

Extensive controls surround the ultimate purchasers and the uses to which the weapons are put.

We can be justifiably proud of our regulatory system. Unfortunately, however, there is little or no evidence the proposed UNATT will have any material effect on illicit international trafficking of weapons.

Many other nations, such as Russia, are much less scrupulous than we are. And countries that are unwilling or unable to police their own domestic manufacturers are not likely to change merely by signing yet another international agreement.

Moreover, there is a world of difference between weapons for military campaigns and those used for recreation and hunting. The U.S. has a long history of respecting the individual ownership of firearms. It is against this legitimate tradition of private ownership that gun-control advocates are exerting their efforts.

Their strategy surfaced most clearly in 2001 at a UN conference aiming to restrict international sales of “small arms and light weapons,” a precursor to the current negotiations. I was part of the Bush administration’s diplomacy to block this effort, which we ultimately succeeded in doing.

During the 2001 debate, I spoke at the UN General Assembly in New York, and the reaction to my remarks revealed the gun-controllers’ hidden agenda.

I said merely that the United States would not agree to any proposed treaty that would violate our Second Amendment freedoms. From the gun-control lobby’s reaction, you would have thought I said something outrageous or even dangerous. In truth, they knew we had uncovered their agenda and spiked it.

Indeed, during the Bush administration’s remaining years, despite occasional flareups of activity, the gun controllers laid low, waiting for their opportunity.

They may have waited too long, because their current frantic efforts betray their fear that Obama could lose in November, replaced by a pro-Second Amendment Romney administration. Significantly, a bipartisan letter signed by 58 senators has already rejected any treaty that seeks, however cleverly, to impose gun-control obligations on the U.S.

The gun-control crowd’s strategy of trying to do through treaties what it cannot accomplish in America’s domestic political process is not unique to that issue.

We have seen and will undoubtedly see many more examples of frustrated statists, unable to prevail in free and open debate, seeking to take their issues global, hoping to find more sympathetic audiences.

Stopping UNATT will be one clear way to send a message that such strategies are doomed to failure.

Bolton was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush.

From whom are ATT proponents getting their talking points?

Friday, July 13th, 2012

Original Story Via:  Dave Workman, Seattle Gun Rights Examiner

Two opinion pieces by retired U.S. military personnel published on the same day in two different publications – both supporting the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty – bear strikingly similar comments, leading Gun Rights Examiner to question who provided talking points to a retired Navy rear admiral and retired Army major general.

These Op-Ed pieces appeared Thursday in Newsday and The Hill, at the same time that Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, was blitzing the Internet to urge gun owners to oppose the treaty, and contact their two U.S. Senators. Gottlieb will be at the U.N. during the fateful week when negotiations on this treaty are to be wrapped up.

Gottlieb was instrumental in the creation of the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (IAPCAR).

Retired military offices have just as much right to support or oppose an issue as any other American citizen. They just shouldn’t say it from what appears to have been the same script.

Rear Admiral (Ret.) Stuart F. Platt, joined by Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals, had this to say in their July 12 Op-Ed that appeared in Newsday:

There’s less oversight on sales of grenade launchers in international markets than of iPods or bananas. Yes, you read that right: We have strict international rules and regulations on selling fruit and MP3 players, but no unifying international laws governing the sale of weapons…

“… While the United States maintains some of the strictest regulations on the import and export of tanks, guns, missiles, ammunition and other arms, many countries have little to no regulation at all. This patchwork system makes it all too easy for traffickers to sell powerful weapons and ammunition to terrorists and warlords that they can then use against our troops and innocent civilians.’

Compare those remarks to what appeared under the byline of Major General Roger R. Blunt (Ret.) in Thursday’s edition of The Hill:

We have international agreements regulating the cross-border sale of iPods and bananas, but we have no global treaties governing the international sale of weapons. The ATT would fix that by becoming the first-ever treaty governing the international trade of conventional weapons.

“The United States has some of the strictest regulations when it comes to the import and export of tanks, attack helicopters, guns, grenades and ammunition, but many countries — especially in the developing world — have little to no regulation. This patchwork system of national laws rewards bad actors by making it easy for them to exploit loopholes. These loopholes are used to arm the terrorists and insurgents killing our troops and warlords who are responsible for untold suffering throughout the developing world.’

A remarkable coincidence of commentary?

One would hardly question the patriotism of men who devoted their lives to the defense of this country. However, the issue at hand isn’t patriotism, but United States constitutional sovereignty. In this case, the Second Amendment-protected individual right to keep and bear arms is allegedly at risk, according to CCRKBA and other gun rights organizations, including the National Rifle Association.

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre spoke at the U.N. this week, as reported by this column, and CCRKBA was involved in crafting House and Senate legislation to prevent a global gun control treaty from affecting the Second Amendment.

Today’s exercise is about the First Amendment, which gun rights advocates also hold dear, along with the other amendments that delineate individual rights in the Bill of Rights. This column has no dispute with Maj. Gen. Blunt, Rear Admiral Platt or Mr. Carey about exercising their right to free speech.

It’s just curious how they managed to say it so similarly on the same day in two different publications.

The U.N. Arms Trade Treaty and the Second Amendment

Friday, July 13th, 2012

Original Story Via:  Foundry.org

By Ted R. Bromund, Ph.D.

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.

The U.N. is aware of the political dangers of appearing to stomp openly on the Second Amendment. It uses code words; it runs closed meetings—a veteran of the process tells me that meetings were normally open until the National Rifle Association began showing up at them—and, above all, it plays a long game. A big problem with talking about the ATT as a “gun grab” treaty is that the U.N. works by taking slices: when it comes to the U.N., being outraged by one development is no substitute for focusing on how the slices pile up over time.

I don’t give much too much credit to the U.S. for stating as a red line that it will uphold the Second Amendment, because that raises the question of what relevant activities are (as the State Department puts it in its red line) “permitted by law or protected by the U.S. Constitution.” Simply backing the Second Amendment is good, but it is better to spell out—as Senator Jerry Moran (R–KS) did at Heritage recently—exactly what rights and activities you believe the Second Amendment protects. Only in that way does a promise to uphold the Second Amendment carry the full weight that it deserves.

So what are the domestic concerns posed by the ATT? Four are important.

  1. Transfer requirements. First, there are specific textual requirements. The most recent draft text states, for example, that the ATT will apply to “all international transfers of conventional arms” but then goes on to define “international transfers” as “the transfer of title or control over the conventional arms.”

Does this mean that any transfers, including domestic ones, count as international and are thus subject to the treaty’s provisions? There are similar concerns related to the potential reporting requirements of the treaty and thus to the possible creation of a U.N.-based gun registry. If it is to be true to its published red lines, the U.S. cannot accept any of this.

  1. International business. Second, most major U.S. arms manufacturers have an international financing, insurance, and parts and components chain. The ATT could become a means for foreign countries to pressure U.S. firms to exit the market, reducing the ability of Americans to make effective use of their firearms rights.
  2. Further review of the rules. This is not the end of the process. The ATT will be elaborated at review conferences, where the U.S. goal is to develop “best practices” for its implementation. Similarly, if President Obama were to sign the ATT but not submit it to the Senate for ratification, the U.S. would hold itself obligated to “refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose” of the ATT.
  3. Constitutional interpretation. Finally, the ATT is part of a process that will inspire judges and legal theorists who believe that the Constitution needs to be reinterpreted in light of transnational norms. This is the most important problem of all, though it is broader than the ATT.

Just because the ATT is not a “gun grab” treaty does not mean it raises no domestic concerns: “Gun grabs” are less plausible than “death by a thousand cuts.” On the other hand, the ATT should raise concerns beyond the Second Amendment. Representative Mike Kelly (R–PA) recently led 130 of his colleagues in expressing a range of concerns about the ATT to the Administration.

It makes sense to balance legitimate expressions of concern for the Second Amendment with concerns on economic, foreign policy, and national security grounds. There’s enough to dislike about the ATT to keep everyone busy.

IAPCAR WELCOMES PHILIPPINES GUN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION

Friday, July 6th, 2012

Original Story Via:  TheGunMag.com

The A2S5 Coalition of the Philippines is the latest organization to join forces with the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (IAPCAR), raising their international membership to 23 member organizations in 15 different nations around the globe.

With member groups on every continent, IAPCAR executive director Philip Watson has been more than pleased with the positive response the group has received.

“With nine new member groups all from different countries since last fall, IAPCAR’s steady growth has been a welcome sign among those that love freedom and a warning to those that do not.” Watson also noted, “It proves that people in all corners of the globe believe in the right of personal security and the defense of one’s home and family. The human right of self-defense is a value we share across all international borders, regardless of race, nationality, or ethnic origin.”

“This is a significant development for us,” said Mike Melchor, the A2S5 Coalition’s director for strategic plans.

Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, who was instrumental in creating IAPCAR, was very happy to have A2S5 as IAPCAR’s newest affiliate in the Philippines.

“We are very excited to welcome our friends from the Philippines,” he observed. “Gun owners in the Philippines are currently faced with increasing regulatory actions on civilian ownership of firearms. We can be helpful to each other in our movement to protect firearms rights in our home countries and around the world.”

The Arms Trade Treaty is currently under negotiation at the United Nations and set to be signed the last week of July, placing many arms rights groups at odds with global gun control advocates. “IAPCAR strongly opposes any UN treaty infringing on national sovereignty or individual gun rights,” noted Julianne Versnel, director of operations at the Second Amendment Foundation, the second influential gun rights group instrumental in forming IAPCAR.

The International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (http://iapcar.com/) is the only worldwide political action group focusing on the human right to keep and bear arms. Founded in 2010, IAPCAR has grown to 23 major gun-rights organizations and conducts campaigns designed to inform the public and promote the right of self-defense and gun-ownership.

Disarmed America: Tying UN treaty to DC’s 2A resistance

Friday, July 6th, 2012

Original Story Via:  – Seattle Gun Rights Examiner

The same political mindset that is pushing the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) talks this month is also at work keeping residents of Washington, D.C. from exercising their Second Amendment rights, and one might suggest that Bellevue’s Alan Gottlieb is strongly linked to both quagmires.

As this column has noted, Gottlieb has been actively battling the ATT through his international activities related to the formation of IAPCAR (the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights) and his participation in the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities (WFSA).

And, though not identified by name, the handiwork of the Gottlieb-led Second Amendment Foundation was alluded to by the Washington Times Thursday in a piece about resistance to federal concealed carry reciprocity is stymied over amendments that would allow firearms carrying in the District of Columbia. The newspaper discussed the resistance to District carry by noting, “Currently, the District and Illinois stand alone in banning the bearing of arms outright. This could be legally problematic. A federal court recently ruled in the Woollard case that Maryland’s carry laws were too strict, and the state appealed the ruling.”

The Woollard case was a SAF effort. Why there is some mental block in the mainstream press toward reporting SAF court activities is a mystery. In much of the reportage dealing with the 2010 McDonald v. City of Chicago victory, SAF was also not mentioned. Instead, reporters frequently alluded to it as “a victory for the gun lobby” or “a victory for gun rights advocates.”

In Washington, D.C. the political climate is definitely overcast by anti-gun paranoia and elitism. The Washington Times piece quoted Phil Mendelson, chairman of the D.C. city council, who stated, “I do think carrying has severe implications for the nation’s capital. “We’re different from Maryland because we have motorcades, the president around town, members of Congress going to the supermarket unescorted.”

Imagine that. Members of Congress going to the supermarket unescorted. Millions of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens do that every day, and they manage to get back home in one piece, even though millions of their fellow citizens are legally carrying — unobtrusively in their presence, one might add.

The same mindset that wants to keep District residents disarmed wants to plant the seeds for global civilian disarmament with the ATT. As a story carried by CNS News Thursday explained, there are grave concerns about the ATT and what it could ultimately mean to Second Amendment sovereignty. President Obama may glibly dismiss such concerns in his strutting, hip upscale down-his-nose public speaking style, but this is the same guy who reversed long-standing U.S. policy on global gun control by embracing the ATT back in 2009 after the Bush administration previously stood firm in singular opposition.

He’s also the same guy who said Obamacare is not a tax, but Chief Justice John Roberts certainly corrected him on that one.

Gottlieb’s Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms had a hand in creating legislation in the House and Senate that would derail ATT threats to the Second Amendment, as this column noted. There is considerable Capitol Hill concern about the ATT, especially in the wake of the Obamacare surprise, that it was constitutional after all…because it is a tax.

Bureaucrats and politicians who seek to disarm people, whether through local resistance to gun rights expansion in this country, or promotion of broad international treaties that are prone to misuse and abuse, are misguided at best. Public disarmament has never had a good outcome for the public.

Such disarmament comes in many forms, typically by increments and by the time the damage is done, how it got started is less important than how it can be reversed. In this country we’ve had help from the courts, with cases pushed by SAF and others, but an international treaty will be beyond the power of U.S. courts, and that might just be what global gun control proponents are counting on.

Palestinian status snit delays UN ATT talks

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

Original Story Via Dave Workman, Gun Rights Examiner

American gun rights advocates might thank the Palestinians and their supporters for delaying, until Tuesday afternoon, anyway, the start of the long-awaited Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) negotiations at the United Nations, although it leaves two key players from Washington State in a bit of a lurch.

Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and his wife, Julianne, have been key players in organizing the opposition to the ATT. Both are planning to be at the U.N. sometime during the negotiation process. It is widely known that CCRKBA staff had a role in crafting legislation sponsored by Congressman Joe Walsh (R-IL) and Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) that would protect the Second Amendment from any such international treaty.

The session is now scheduled to begin at noon Pacific Time. It is not clear when representatives from Non-Government Organizations (NGO) will get to speak. Not only will the Gottliebs be attending at some point, so also is Wayne LaPierre from the National Rifle Association.

What has become clear lately is that despite the eagerness of many U.N. members to adopt some sort of treaty, there is opposition from powerful corners, including China and Russia.

The United States under Barack Obama reversed position a couple of years ago, and now officially supports a treaty, but that does not mean the document has a chance of getting through the Senate ratification process. If there is any question about Unites States constitutional sovereignty, the ATT is probably a non-starter.

Alan Gottlieb has been working to counter international gun control efforts for several years. He was a key player in the formation of IAPCAR, the International Association for Protection of Civilian Arms Rights. Both Gottliebs have been back and forth to Europe several times, participating in the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities.

The irony about Obama’s support for the treaty should not be lost on gun owners following the Fast and Furious debacle. While the current administration wants to clamp down on global gun trafficking, it continues withholding documents key to the investigation of that scandal by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

While President Obama will apparently sign the treaty – which proponents want to be legally binding – his own attorney general stands in contempt of Congress.

Wednesday is Independence Day, but there could be fireworks of the political variety starting Tuesday afternoon, and continuing through the month.

HARD COPY: Letter from anti-gun groups to Obama pressing for a strong UN ATT

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

CLICK HERE TO VIEW LETTER: Anti-Gun UN Arms Trade Treaty Letter to Obama

Or copy paste link into browser:

http://iapcar.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Robust-UN-ATT-Letter.pdf