Don’t miss this article. Kopel, a former prosecutor, talks about recent UN
activities and reasons why people must never allow governments to maintain
firearms registries. Registration is for all time. Benevolent government
such as the Weimar Republic, think themselves civilized because they
establish a firearms registry. However, they are often succeeded by less
benevolent governments, like the Nazi’s who make use of registries.

http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel.shtml

U.N. Gives Tyranny a Hand
Dictatorships are using the U.N. to promote the firearms policies of Hitler.

Mr. Kopel is research director at the Independence Institute.
August 6, 2001 2:25 p.m.

Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in an NRO series on the United
Nations Conference on Small Arms (the previous installment: #3).

At the U.N. Small Arms Conference, Iran took the lead in promoting a ban on
weapons supplies to non-states. The “non-state actors” clause would require
vendors “to supply small arms and light weapons only to governments, or to
entities duly authorized by government.” This would make it illegal, for
example, to supply weapons to the Kurds or religious minorities in Iran, in
case Iranian persecution or genocide drove them to rebellion. Had the
provision been in effect in 1776, the sale of firearms to the American
Patriots would have been prohibited. Had the clause been in effect during
World War II, the transfer of Liberator pistols to the French Resistance,
and to many other resistance groups, would have been illegal.

The United States stood firm against this clause, rejecting “compromise”
efforts to revise the language, or to insert it into the preamble of the
Program of Action. Although Canada pushed hard on this point, the U.S.
delegation would not relent. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton
pointed out that the proposal “would preclude assistance to an oppressed
non-state group defending itself from a genocidal government.”

Bolton’s statement, by the way, reflects the enormous contribution that Jews
for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership has made to gun debate, through
historical research demonstrating the victim disarmament is the sine qua non
of genocide.

More recent research by constitutional attorney Stephen Halbrook has
detailed how the Nazi regime used firearms-control laws, enacted by the
democratic Weimar Republic, to disarm potential opponents of the regime, and
to facilitate the persecution of Jews.

U.N. Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette (of Canada) explained that in
some parts of the world, an AK-47 could be obtained for $15 or a bag of
grain. Small-arms “proliferation erodes the authority of legitimate but weak
governments,” she complained.

U.S. delegate Faith Whittlesey (ambassador to Switzerland, under Reagan)
replied that the U.N. “non-state actors” provision “freezes the last coup.
It favors established governments, while taking away rights from
individuals. It does not recognize any value higher than peace, such as
liberty.”

According to the U.N., any government with a U.N. delegation is a
“legitimate” government. This U.N. standard directly conflicts with the
Declaration of Independence, which states that the only legitimate
governments are those “deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.”

In a letter to the New York Times, answering a Times editorial criticizing
the U.S. for not allowing the conference to be used as a tool to disarm
civilians, Whittlesey elaborated:

The highest priority of freedom-loving people is liberty, even more than
peace. The small arms you demonize often protect men, women and children
from tyranny, brutality and even the genocide too frequently perpetrated by
governments and police forces. The world’s numerous dictators would be
delighted to stem the flow of small arms to indigenous freedom fighters and
civilians alike to minimize any resistance.. . .

The right of individual self-defense in the face of criminal intimidation
and government aggression is a deeply held belief of the American people
dating back to 1776, when small arms in the hands of private individuals
were the means used to secure liberty and independence.

The United Nations Conference on Small Arms was held in a room where a large
poster proclaimed: “SMALL ARMS KILL WOMEN & CHILDREN.” (Meanwhile, the U.N.
propaganda office and its accomplices in the U.S. media claimed that there
was no antigun agenda at the conference.) The U.N. says that small arms kill
500,000 people a year: 300,000 in war, and another 200,000 from murder,
suicide, and accidents. Put aside, the fact that most war deaths are caused
by governments, which wouldn’t be disarmed under the U.N. program. Also put
aside questions about whether the U.N. antigun program would really disarm
murderers. And forget the topic of whether antigun laws might reduce gun
suicides or gun accidents, but would save few, if any, lives – since
self-destructive people have many potential tools available.

Let us assume that the U.N. antigun program – which, as I detailed in a
previous column, is a program for slow-motion disarmament of everyone except
the government – would save every single one of those 500,000 lives.

Now, compare those half-million annual deaths with the 170 million civilians
(not soldiers) who were murdered by governments in the first nine decades of
the last century, as detailed by University of Hawaii political scientist
Rudy Rummel.

Given that democide – Rummel’s term for mass murders by government – appears
to be confined almost exclusively to regimes which have attempted to disarm
their victims, it is reasonable to conclude that if every man and woman on
this planet had owned a working firearm and ammunition, many – perhaps
nearly all – of those 179 million lives might have been saved.

If small arms are really as destructive as the U.N. claims, it would still
take 340 years for small arms to kill as many people as died from 1900 to
1990 due to the lack of small arms. Stated another way, even if we accept
every one of the premises of the antigun advocates at the U.N., gun
prohibition appears to be about four times deadlier than gun proliferation.

Gun “proliferation” begins with “pro” and “life.” Gun prohibition begins
with registration, and ends with genocide.

Besides serving as the sine qua non of genocide, civilian disarmament helps
dictatorships maintain their power – as demonstrated by the string of
dictatorships that rose to support U.N. efforts to disarm everyone except
the government.

Djbrina Moumouni, secretary general of the cabinet of the president of the
Niger called illicit weapons “a scourge” which cause “drug trafficking, mass
displacement, slow economic development and recovery, and the exacerbation
of conflicts. The Niger has not escaped that fallout, and has suffered armed
rebellion for some years now.”

The Niger delegate’s speech was a euphemistic reference to the fact that the
pastoral Tuareg people of northern Niger, in the Sahara, spent much of the
1990s fighting for their independence from Niger. The Tuareg objected to
uranium being extracted from their region, while profits went to people
connected to the far-away central government.

To stay in Niger, the Tuareg wanted federalism and some regional autonomy.
Their desire to leave was greatly intensified when they starved en masse in
1984-85 thanks to the Niger government’s venality and incompetence. And the
central government of Niger, which tends to alternate between military
dictatorships and one-party civilian dictatorships, hasn’t exactly been a
good place for people to work within the system.

A report from the European Centre for Conflict Prevention, a pro-disarmament
group, describes these problems in Niger quite straightforwardly, and
explains that the UN’s solution is to disarm the Tuareg:

The United Nations have not been directly involved in managing the conflict,
but the organization is dealing with a closely related issue: the
proliferation of small arms in the region. In 1993, it set up an Advisory
Mission on the issue, at the request of President Konar? of Mali. The
mission produced its findings to the Secretary-General in 1996. It
identified a variety of causes for the unfettered flow of arms, including
political instability, poverty, unemployment, ethnic and religious
differences and the spill-over of intra-state conflicts into other states.
This was said to apply to most of the states visited during the mission,
including Niger.

What the European Centre and the U.N. (and their prohibitionist allies in
private organizations) fail to understand is that in places like Niger,
small arms are part of the solution, not the problem. The Niger government
only began to make small steps towards treating the Tuareg better when the
Tuareg were able to initiate an armed rebellion. One of the reasons that the
Niger government never had the choice of following the policy of the Rwanda
government (perpetrating genocide against a disaffected ethnic group) was
that the Tuareg were armed.

Likewise presenting an articulate defense of the pro-dictatorship position
was Gaspar Santos Rufino, Vice-Minister for Defenze of Angola: “African
leaders, in analyzing the causes of the proliferation and illicit
trafficking of small arms, suggest that Member States and the suppliers
should be more transparent in their conduct and go beyond national
interests. This means, so far as possible, to impose limits on the legal
production of certain basic goods, to exercise rigorous control of their
circulation, and even to destroy surplus production of goods.

“It should be possible to do this with small arms and light weapons, as they
are not basic goods and will not be missed by our people.”

Mr. Rufino, of course, is the Defense Minister of a Communist dictatorship
which was installed by the Cuban army’s small arms and light weapons in
1975-76, and which has permitted exactly one election (criticized by some as
fraudulent) in the last quarter-century.

Rufino complained: “In Angola, men with guns in their hands have opposed the
legitimate Government for many years. It should be clear that it is
imperative to destroy surplus arms, regulate their production in the
legislation of manufacturing countries, and sell them to legally constituted
and authorized entities.”

The “men with guns in their hands” are the men of UNITA, one of the groups
that (along with Rufino’s Communist organization) fought against the
Portuguese colonial regime until Portugal surrendered in 1975. Rufino’s side
would have lost the civil war which followed, but for Fidel Castro’s
modern-day Hessians.

What makes Rufino’s dictatorship – created by Cuban “men with guns in their
hands” – legitimate? As Rufino shows, beneath the veneer of humanitarian
rhetoric, the objective of small arms prohibition is to ensure that
unpopular dictatorships enjoy a monopoly of force.

Yasir Arafat’s U.N. delegate charged that Israel arms its settlers
illegally, thus turning them into a militia. She demanded that Israel to
disarm the settlers.

Nguyen Thanh Chau of Viet Nam, a communist dictatorship which shot its way
into power, called for “a comprehensive approach to the prevention,
reduction and eradication of the illicit trade in small arms and light
weapons at all levels.”

Sar Kheng, Minister of the Interior of Cambodia, represented a nation which,
under its previous rulers, had taken care to confiscate guns before
slaughtering a third of the population.

Cambodian gun control had been a legacy of French colonialism. A series of
Royal Ordinances, decreed by a monarchy subservient to the French, appears
to have been enacted out of fear of the Communist and anti-colonial
insurgencies that were taking place in the 1920s and 1930s in Southeast
Asia, although not in Cambodia. The first law, in 1920, dealt with the
carrying of guns, while the last law, in 1938, imposed a strict licensing
system. Only hunters could have guns, and they were allowed to own only a
single firearm. These colonial laws appear to have stayed in place after
Cambodia was granted independence. The Khmer Rouge enacted no new gun
control laws, for they enacted no laws at all other than a Constitution.

As detailed in the book Lethal Laws, the moment the Khmer Rouge took power,
they set out to disarm the populace. One Cambodian recalls that

Eang [a woman] watched soldiers stride onto the porches of the houses and
knock on the doors and ask the people who answered if they had any weapons.
“We are here now to protect you,” the soldiers said, “and no one has a need
for a weapon any more.” People who said that they kept no weapons were
forced to stand aside and allow the soldiers to look for themselves. . . .
The round-up of weapons took nine or ten days, and once the soldiers had
concluded the villagers were no longer armed, they dropped their pretense of
friendliness. . . . The soldiers said everyone would have to leave the
village for a while, so that the troops could search for weapons; when the
search was finished, they could return.

People being forced out of villages and cities were searched thoroughly, and
weapons and foreign currency were confiscated. To the limited extent that
Cambodians owned guns through the government licensing system, the names of
registered gun owners were of course available to the new government.

The current (non-genocidal) Communist dictatorship in Cambodia does not
trust its people with arms any more than its predecessor did. The UN
delegate called “illegally held arms” (e.g., all civilian arms) major
obstacles to efforts to reconstruct and rehabilitate the country and to the
building of democracy and respect for human rights.”

He explained:

The Government of Cambodia has designated management of all arms and
explosives as its major task, and has instituted several measures, such as
collecting and confiscating all arms, explosives and ammunition left by the
war; instituting practical measures to reduce the reckless use of arms; and
strengthening the management of weapons registration. Those who possessed
weapons during the civil war wish to continue possessing them for
self-protection. On the other hand, criminals have no intention of giving up
their weapons, because they need them to carry out their criminal offences.
However, with assistance from the European Union and from non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), there has been some success in raising the awareness
of the problem among a majority of Cambodians.

To date, more than 112,000 light weapons, together with several tons of
arms, explosives and ammunition, have been collected. More than 50 per cent
of those weapons and some 4,000 landmines have been crushed and burned in
public ceremonies under the slogan “Flames for Peace.”

Like Cambodia, Pakistan has a dictatorship determined to possess a monopoly
of force. According to Human Rights Watch, the military dictatorship
perpetrates torture and many other human rights abuses.

Moin-Ud-Din Haider, Minister of the Interior, said, “Pakistan has become a
victim of the proliferation of small arms and light weapons.” “It has
threatened our political stability,” he explained, meaning that arms held by
the civilians threatened the power of Mr. Haider’s military dictatorship.

“Since February of last year,” he boasted, “we have not issued a single
license for any weapon” – demonstrating how a licensing system can be easily
converted to a prohibition system.

He continued: “We have also prohibited the public display of weapons” – a
parallel to his dictatorship’s ban on public rallies and demonstrations.

“We have started a weapons collection programme composed of two phases. In
Phase I, the Government announced general amnesty from 5 to 20 June for
voluntary surrender of illicit weapons” – similar to the gun surrender
program run by President Clinton’s Dept. of Housing and Urban Development,
and recently terminated by the Bush administration. Under both the Clinton
and the Pakistani program, the targeted weapons firearms owned by civilians,
regardless of criminality.

Pakistan’s delegate turned to the gun licensing system: “At present, the
campaign to recover illicit weapons from those who did not surrender their
weapons during the amnesty period is in full swing. During the amnesty
period, we acquired a total of 86,757 weapons. In Phase II, we plan to
cancel all automatic weapons licenses, which were loosely issued in the
thousands by previous governments. Revalidation of existing arms licenses
will be handled with great care.” In other words, the gun licenses which
were issued by the democratic government would be eliminated by the
dictatorship. As in Weimar/Nazi Germany, the licensing law created by the
democracy proves to be a useful prohibition tool for the dictatorship.

Finally, the Pakistani Interior Minister made a brief pretense of pretending
to respect Pakistan’s traditional culture of gun ownership, before
announcing the government’s plan to obliterate it:

It must be emphasized that in segments of our society, possessing and
carrying arms has been a proud cultural legacy. However, to their credit,
many such people voluntarily surrendered their weapons. Thus, while the
Government has sought to implement sound strategies, the real winners are
the people of Pakistan, whose concern, cooperation and willingness to make
ours a weapon-free society went a long way in launching our campaign on a
promising note.

The wretched dictatorships endorsing the U.N.’s antigun program wouldn’t
have surprised the federalist Noah Webster. Arguing in 1787 for adoption of
the proposed American Constitution, Webster urged Americans not to worry
that the new federal government could become a military dictatorship, for
“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed.” (An
Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution
(Philadelphia 1787).”

The “United Nations” was originally a name for the coalition that defeated
the Axis in World War II. But today, gun prohibitionists and dictatorships
are using the United Nations to promote the firearms policies of Hitler and
Hirohito: First, preventing aid to victims to genocide and tyranny. And
second, obliterating the moral distinction between free governments, which
are founded on the consent of the governed, and dictatorships, whose victims
have the God-given right to remove them by force of arms.