UN Follies

I haven’t mentioned the United Nations “Small Arms Review Conference” yet. If you need background, here is one of Alphecca’s recent posts that will bring you up to speed.

First, here are my opinions about the UN. I believe it started out with good intentions, and it might have made sense in the Cold War period. It might have prevented wars between superpowers. “Might” is the operative word, because there’s no way to prove or disprove it did any good at all.

Today the UN is a way for various nations to peck at the United States and to funnel money into dictator’s and UN official’s pockets. It has become a corrupt blight on New York City. The UN should either go away or be reformed into something good. I suppose one could argue that certain of their humanitarian-health programs, certain cultural ones, and other programs are beneficial to someone. Maybe, but these programs don’t redeem the whole.

The UN is looking at a real problem; terrorist and guerrilla forces buying machine guns, explosives, mortars and everything else. These forces have armed children to fight children. No one, except third world war lords, supports drafting children.

These despots and UN do-gooders want to regulate trade in weapons in order to disarm bandit, terrorist, and guerilla bands (some of the latter are actually fighting the despots). They claim they don’t want to interfere with legal firearm ownership. But, the devil’s in the details. They advocate licensing and registration schemes. They would outlaw “military” weapons (which could logically include M1Garands, etc). Such regulations are anathema to me and many other gun owners.

Maybe UN officials are telling the truth and the results of this conference won’t affect my personal ownership of firearms—at least not this time.

What happens when their hopes of disarming Africa’s children soldiers fail? They’ll do what every other collectivist minded “leaders” will do. They’ll promulgate another treaty with harsher restrictions that will then begin to affect me. When that one fails, they’ll pass yet another treaty ultimately making me into a slave or an outlaw.

Prohibitions don’t work. Black markets have thrived in despite the harshest repressions—Jews in the Nazi surrounded Warsaw Ghetto got guns.

You can’t ban your way into peace. Look at England, which banned handguns, and experienced higher handgun crime rates. The actual percentage of increase is debatable, but it doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that banning didn’t bring peace to England’s streets despite the promises of gun controllers. If gun control worked, England’s handgun crime rates should have plummeted.

You have to solve the problems that lead to child soldiers and street thugs in the first place. That takes years of hard work—something that despots and UN do-gooders won’t do.

Bottom line; this conference should never have been hosted on US soil and US government officials should never agree to even one punctuation mark in the final document. If our representatives to the UN can derail the conference, so much the better.