Obama to Back International Gun Control Treaty

President Obama will announce in a visit here today that he will push the U.S. Senate to ratify an inter-American arms trafficking treaty designed to curb the flow of guns and ammunition to drug cartels and other armed groups in the hemisphere. [More]

In yesterday's Gun Rights Examiner column, I talked about a "global gun control" column in The New York Times by Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and I linked to the UN Firearms Protocol.

This is a more regional approach, but as you see from the signatories, it's nonetheless extensive. What the WaPo did not bring us is the text of the treaty itself. That way, their readers can make up their minds based on what their "Authorized Journalist" tells them to believe.

Here it is--read it.

Candidly, legalese makes my eyes glaze over. So I may be totally off-base, but according to this, could "illicit manufacture" of ammunition include reloading? What about people who make their own black powder rifles? And what's the deal with extradition?

Hopefully some fine legal minds will weigh in. I do note one reference that concerns me:

U.S. gun-rights groups participated as observers in drafting the treaty, which experts say includes language stating that it does not impinge on the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment.

I understand the motivation to do this--I really do. It's just that, to my mind, an American leader would tell foreign powers to mind their own damned business and keep their tyrannical mitts off our Bill of Rights if they know what's good for them.

I said as much in this old Guns and Ammo column:

Proposing that American gun-rights advocates confer with the United Nations is not only a waste of time and resources that are needed at home, but also lends such venues unearned legitimacy--as if the UN should have any stance on American liberty other than to shut up and learn.

Which resulted in this from my good friends at the NRA Members Councils:

Yet despite this, those like David Codrea, in an article in the September 2003 issue of “Guns and Ammo”, would continue to council disengagement, retreat from the global battlefield, and a kind of pseudo-isolationism that fails to recognize that there are no protective oceans to hide behind in a world-wide battle of ideas. It is apparently more important for Codrea and his ilk to maintain an ideological purity of thought, rather than achieve any of the incremental positional successes that could best guarantee eventual victory. What is more, it is hard to imagine how an almost Islamist-like exclusionary world-view will enable the Codreas of the world to convert more than the occasional wandering “Aryan” to the paradise of a rapidly diminishing gunowner “reservation”.

OK, pally. Looks like we're going to do things your way.