UN Gun Ban

This article is just a touch bizarre. I'm wondering if someone has a slight loss of touch with reality.

For 12 years, I fought lawlessness as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the television series Prime Suspect. The crimes I solved were sometimes horrific, but I have since discovered that they can pale in comparison to the real-life horrors faced by millions of ordinary people when guns are easily available and can fall into the wrong hands.

Over the past five years, I have become deeply involved in the Control Arms Campaign, run by Oxfam International, Amnesty International and the International Action Network on Small Arms. I have visited South Africa and northern Uganda, and met children who have been raped at gunpoint, seen their parents shot or been forced to become child soldiers.

Um. Don't you mean you were an actor playing a detective created by Lynda La Plante. You didn't really solve anything. Then there is the Africa woes, which seem to miss the point that just as many, if not more of that violence was perpetrated by thugs carrying machete, and not guns. But, hey, that doesn't prove the point that guns are evil, so you must be right.

The Control Arms Campaign is trying to stop weapons from getting into the wrong hands, and being used to kill or harm innocent people. At the UN conference on the small arms trade, it is calling on governments to agree on principles to govern the transfer of weapons between countries.

Opinion polls commissioned by the Control Arms Campaign and released yesterday show a groundswell of popular support for tougher arms controls. The research showed that 87 per cent of all respondents want strict international controls on where weapons can be exported to.

Next week's UN meeting is the second world conference on the small arms and light weapons trade. I was at the first, held in 2001. In the intervening years, almost two million people have been killed by guns. The challenge this time is for governments to agree on tough controls that will actually save lives. Good intentions and empty rhetoric mean very little to people like Mary.

Just inter-country transfers is all that is being requested? I don't think so.

Amnesty International, OXFAM, and IANSA seem to be also relating famine to the proliferation of guns. Though I would say they over state the case:

Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) are pushing for a treaty to "protect civilians from armed violence."

Those three groups -- which have formed a coalition called the Control Arms Campaign -- say their goal is to reduce arms proliferation and misuse -- "and to convince governments to introduce global principles to regulate the transfers of weapons." They are urging the United Nations to impose a "binding arms trade treaty."

According to Amnesty International, nearly 2 billion people live in deep poverty, a problem made worse by the "uncontrolled proliferation of guns and other weapons that also fuels human rights abuses and escalates conflicts." Amnesty International claims that weapons kill more 1,000 men, women, and children every day.

"It doesn't have to be like this," Amnesty International says on its website. The Control Arms Campaign believes a global Arms Trade Treaty is the solution.

By standing on the point that it's guns that are solely the problem they ignore reality in many of the conflicts that are occurring. Ignoring that civil war is occurring in most of the problem areas will result in no changes. Most of the areas of conflict have plenty of guns, so outlawing international trade won't solve the problem.

But then there is the question of National Sovereignty and the codified rights:

The U.N. conference poses a direct threat to America's constitutionally protected individual right to keep and bear arms, said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF).

Gottlieb, who plans to attend the U.N. conference, is urging the U.S. government to reconsider its financial support for the United Nations, given its effort to undermine the Second Amendment.

"Had it not been for our tradition of private firearms ownership, our citizens might still be subjects of the queen," Gottlieb said in a press release.

"Had it not been for America, all of Europe might be speaking German. Were America not the 'great arsenal of democracy' that President Franklin D. Roosevelt described in 1940, the world would be a far different place, and the sanctimonious bureaucrats at the U.N. might instead be working in labor camps."

I don't think that there is much worry that the US will become part of this overall sanction against gun ownership. But it is worth noting what the UN is doing and how the US representatives react. I'm sure this will be a very interesting UN action.