Obama's United Nations Backdoor to Gun Control

Wall Street Journal ^ | April 14, 2013 | JOHN BOLTON AND JOHN YOO

[neverdem]

Luckily, the Constitution gives the Senate exclusive power to ratify, or block, the Arms Trade Treaty.

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...

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In Reid v. Covert (1957), a plurality of justices agreed that the treaty power could not undermine the Bill of Rights, rightly trying to close the huge loophole that Missouri had erroneously opened...

--snip--

There also is an international legal doctrine that during the period when a country has signed but not yet ratified a treaty, it must take no measures that defeat the treaty's object and purposes. Under some liberal theories, this would allow the president to put some measures of the new arms treaty into effect by executive order...

[neverdem]

So much for theory. What practical effect did the unratified Kyoto Protocol have upon the U.S.?

[molson209]

Does Obama’s budget have a huge increase for the UN ?

[Don Corleone]

Luckily, the Constitution gives the Senate exclusive power to ratify, or block, the Arms Trade Treaty.

Luck has nothing to do with it. The FF were brilliant men who knew and understood history. Thank God for their brilliance.

[Marcella]

Yes.