Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to sign an arms trade treaty opposed by the Senate and the gun lobby as early as Wednesday, and Republicans aren’t happy about it.
Kerry’s plan to sign the treaty on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York this week has sparked immediate criticism from GOP opponents.
“This treaty is already dead in the water in the Senate, and they know it,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services. “The Administration is wasting precious time trying to sign away our laws to the global community and unelected U.N. bureaucrats.”
A majority of Senate oppose the treaty because it covers small arms, making ratification impossible in the short term.
Background on the treaty via John Bolton and John Yoo:
Even before his most ambitious gun-control proposals were falling by the wayside, President Obama was turning for help to the United Nations. On April 2, the United States led 154 nations to approve the Arms Trade Treaty in the U.N. General Assembly. While much of the treaty governs the international sale of conventional weapons, its regulation of small arms would provide American gun-control advocates with a new tool for restricting rights. Yet because the Constitution requires that two-thirds of the Senate give its advice and consent to any treaty, Second Amendment supporters still have a political route to stop the administration.
Like many international schemes, this treaty has seemingly benign motives. It seeks to “eradicate the illicit trade in conventional arms and to prevent their diversion to the illicit market,” where they are used in civil wars and human-rights disasters. The treaty calls for rigorous export controls on heavy conventional weapons, such as tanks, missiles, artillery, helicopters and warships.
Yet, as with many utopian devices, the treaty fails the test of enforcement. Some of the world’s largest arms traffickers either voted against the agreement or abstained. The U.S., quite rightly, already has the world’s most serious export controls in place, while nations such as North Korea, Syria, Iran, Russia and China will continue to traffic in arms with abandon.
But the new treaty also demands domestic regulation of “small arms and light weapons.” The treaty’s Article 5 requires nations to “establish and maintain a national control system,” including a “national control list.” Article 10 requires signatories “to regulate brokering” of conventional arms. The treaty offers no guarantee for individual rights, but instead only declares it is “mindful” of the “legitimate trade and lawful ownership” of arms for”recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities.” Not a word about the right to possess guns for a broader individual right of self-defense.
This crap happens all the time and never goes anywhere. You have Progressive Presidents constantly trying to be the Globalist garbage they actually are by supporting this, but thankfully the Senate usually stops it in it's tracks.
Anyone remember when that idiot George W Bush had a hard on to sign over control of 70% of the globe to the UN with the LOST Treaty? Conservative shut that down fast.
North American Lambada Dance Champion 1988, 1989, 1991.