June 20, 2001
July 9, 2001: New Day of Infamy As UN Opens Control Meeting

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) is promoting July 9, 2001 as “Small Arms Destruction Day.” That’s the day that the UN opens an 11-day meeting in New York City of the Preparatory Committee of the UN Conference on Small Weapons.

Small Arms Destruction Day is a massive public relations and propaganda initiative by the governments of Brazil, Mali, the Netherlands and Great Britain, in which all nations are urged to organize, on a voluntary basis, public events of destruction of small arms and light weapons.

Where possible, this should be done together with non-government organizations (NGOs) and “civil society,” a euphemism for the organizations that support the UN global gun control agenda.

IANSA noted that Arend Meerburg, the representative of the Netherlands, explained, “the public destruction of small weapons is one of the best ways to attract worldwide attention for the ideas behind the conference in July.”

The inspiration for this initiative came from the ‘Flamme de la Paix’ (Flame of Peace) in Mali, when numerous firearms were destroyed, an event which received worldwide publicity and which was followed by several other countries.

Targeted Guns
The weapons to be destroyed, according to IANSA, could originate from “post-conflict demobilization, disarmament and rehabilitation programs, could be those collected by police forces from criminal sources, or could be surplus weapons which the national security forces do not need anymore.” The method of destruction is also left to participating countries.

Significantly, IANSA notes that although governments are normally responsible for the destruction of armaments, NGOs and civil society should play an important role to make “Small Arms Destruction Day” a great success. They should spread the message and urge their governments to participate.

As a counter to the UN gun burning event, a group of people in the freerepublic.com Internet site have come up with an alternative proposal for July 9, according to Second Amendment Sisters. They suggest that July 9 be set aside as “National Gun Purchase Day,” and that Americans everywhere send their own message by setting that day aside to buy a rifle, shotgun or handgun.

While that may be a nifty idea, it is unlikely that the anti-gun, globalist media will give gun purchase day as much attention as gun destruction day.

The ponderous full name of the UN meeting is the “Preparatory Committee for the United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects,” which is scheduled for the UN headquarters from July 9-20.

Americans who have been following the UN’s continuing march toward a global gun control treaty that could bypass the Second Amendment to the US Constitution will not find the coming conference a surprise. Gun Week and its sister publications, Women & Guns and Gun News Digest magazines, have been tracking and reporting on multi-national gun control conferences for several years.

NRA Attends Meetings
The National Rifle Association and other gun organizations have also been warning members about this on-going effort, and several years ago, the NRA applied for and received recognition by the UN as a non-governmental organization (NGO) with observer status. Representatives from the NRA have attended many of the international gun control meetings and, on rare occasions, have been allowed to comment.

These international gun control conferences and meetings have been held in various nations around the world.

One of the most recent of these regional meetings was one held in Brisbane, Australia, in May that was attended by representatives of 14 Pacific Island nations as well as Australia and New Zealand (with the US and Japan as observers).

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, agreement was reached on developing a uniform regional gun control policy. The governments of the island nations were expected to adopt broadly uniform controls, such as stricter limits on ownership of semi-automatic and automatic firearms—similar to Australia’s most recent gun registration and confiscation laws. This group was to hold its next meeting in August, after the UN conference.

Also in late May, the UN General Assembly approved a treaty requiring newly-made firearms to be marked with a serial number and place of manufacture so their movements can be traced.

This treaty, negotiated earlier in Vienna, Austria, aims to enable the authorities to trace illicit arms sales globally by requiring nations to set up import and export licensing procedures and ensure records are kept for at least 10 years on guns, parts and ammunition made within their boundaries.

The treaty was drafted as an addition to a pact approved by the General Assembly last November that set legal standards for fighting money laundering and illegal trafficking of humans and drugs. That treaty, aimed at combating global criminal networks, is called the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

Like any treaty, the firearms pact must be signed and ratified by at least 40 countries before it can become international law. It will be open for signing from July 1, 2001 through Dec. 12, 2002.

The treaty commits governments to adoption of legislation making the illicit manufacture and sale of firearms a criminal offense, and authorizing the confiscation of arms that have been illicitly made or sold.

These treaties are in addition to the UN’s July conference agenda, a main feature of which is adoption of an international standard for serial numbering guns and identifying their manufacturers, with all records of firearms manufacturing, domestic and international sales, available at a central UN registry.

Serial numbering and record keeping for all guns is already the law in the US, but under the UN plan, American gun manufacturers would have to comply with new international standards.

Curiously, one of the nations that is balking at the one-world serialization approach is Russia. According to an Agence France Presse report of an international gun control conference in Addis Ababa in April, the Russians believe that introduction of an international marking system would be “unreasonable.” The Russians, major exporters of small arms to governments and increasing their presence in civilian markets, seem to support the idea of identifying small arms, but they have major problems with the proposed international system.

Throughout the progression of the international gun control movement, there have been a number of countries, such as Canada, Japan, Great Britain and some South American nations that have played a key leadership role. In addition, prominent politicians from the European Union have been key leaders.

One of these is former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, now head of the Employment and Social Affairs Committee of the European Parliament and co-chairman of the “Eminent Persons Group,” an international commission of 22 world leaders. Rocard has been identified as a key player in the international gun control movement.

Key Player
On April 23, The Washington Times published a letter from Rocard responding to a story the newspaper published earlier in which it said the proposed international agreement to curtail illicit small arms proliferation “could severely curtail US arms sales abroad and cut deeply into Americans’ Second Amendment Rights.”

Rocard claimed that, “The goal of the July (UN) conference is to enhance transparency and accountability in the transfer of small arms, an objective to which the United States is committed, not to restrict domestic possession.”

Rocard claimed that supplier states need not worry about their sovereign right to produce small arms for legitimate purposes, “such as self-defense, hunting or commercial interests.” He claimed “small arms should be made traceable through universal marking and record keeping. Charging that “transparency is especially important for transfer of weapons of war …notably fully automatic assault rifles, grenade launchers and so forth, he also said that civilian “non-possession for certain categories should be considered. There is a discernible line between possession by non-state actors and civilian possession in general.”

He concluded by saying that the US is expected to help, even if particular aspects of US policy may be detracting from the UN goal.

Clearly, Rocard has admitted that one of the key things “detracting from” and delaying implementation of the global gun control agenda in which only governments—no matter how despotic—control all the guns, is the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Needless to say, the Founding Fathers would be dead set against the kind of government monopoly on firearms that the UN wants to mandate.