The War on Women – Tea Party Nation

The War on Women – Tea Party Nation.

Posted by Judson Phillips

There are actually two wars on women going on right now.  One is a faux war, created by the media.  The other is a very real war.  But since the left launches the second war on women, don’t expect to hear much about it from the drive-by media.

 What is this second war on women that no one is talking about and why should we conservatives be talking about it, regardless of whether we are male or female?

 Joe Salazar is a Colorado Democrat.  Perhaps that is the same thing as saying he is a complete sexist, raging idiot.

 Colorado was considering a bill that would forbid concealed carry permit holders from carrying their weapons on the grounds of colleges and universities.

 Salazar said that women really didn’t need guns to protect themselves if they were afraid.  After all, they might not get raped.   Or they might go off and just start shooting people for no good reason because, well who knows why.

 Women of Colorado rejoice!  Don’t worry your pretty little heads about making decisions about your self-defense because you have sexist pigs like Joe Salazar to make those decisions for you!

 Salazar is not the only idiot in Colorado.  The University of Colorado is like almost every other college and university in the nation.  Liberals control it and of course they don’t like guns.

 So what is a woman supposed to do if she is stalked or threatened by a rapist?  These bright lights think a whistle is a great defense.    Forget bringing a knife to a gunfight, these dim bulbs want you to bring a little piece of plastic to a gunfight.  Is it any wonder why American students at all levels constantly fail when compared to foreign students?

 Our children and young adults are being taught by morons.

 Conservatives learn from not only their mistakes but also other people’s mistakes.  We learned that banning guns in certain areas like college campuses does not make them safer.  It only makes it easier for criminals. 

 If a criminal is going to come on campus to rape a woman do you think he is really going to worry about another law that prohibits him from carrying a gun?  No, he is going to be jumping up, giving Joe Salazar high fives, thanking him for making the campus a target rich zone and an area where he can prey on victims without fear of running into someone who is armed and can fight back.

 Conservatives must fight these stupid laws but we also must realize something else.  Self-defense is our personal responsibility.

 Unfortunately for real Americans, we are facing the increasing reality that the left is stripping our 2nd Amendment rights from us.  Perhaps even worse, the Supreme Court is becoming less than friendly for conservatives.    Cases like District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down the gun control laws of the District of Columbia.  Heller was a 5-4 decision. 

 After the way Chief Justice John Roberts folded like a cheap black robe, there is no way any of us should feel comfortable that the Supreme Court will protect our 2^nd Amendment Rights.

 The battle for the 2^nd Amendment is a battle we cannot lose.  The 2^nd Amendment is not about personal protection.  It is about preserving liberty and stopping government tyranny.

 If you live in a jurisdiction that has repealed the 2^nd Amendment, you need to think about alternatives for self-defense if you cannot carry a gun.

 Martial arts is one of those alternatives you should think about.  Martial arts has a couple of benefits.  The first is it is physical fitness.     We have to deal with the fact Obamacare is not going to be repealed.  The Republicans have made no serious effort to repeal Obamacare.  They have not even tried an incremental approach to repeal. 

 The best way to fight Obamacare and avoid the death panels that will be there, regardless of what the Obama Regime says, is to be on offense.  So much disease is preventable.  If you smoke, stop smoking.  If you are overweight, change your diet and lose weight.  Get out and exercise.

 What do you do if you cannot carry your gun with you?  Are you just going to be another victim?

 Martial arts, particularly those that started in Asia were started as a response to a population that was disarmed.  If the population could not fight with weapons, they had to find another way to fight back. 

 Today there are a number of very effective martial arts that will teach you how to defend yourself.  You do not have to be a teenager to take these martial arts.  Some of them emphasize the ability to fight back without being in fantastic shape.

 Combat Hapkido is one of them.  Being a small person is actually a benefit in this martial art. 

 We must fight for our rights.  But we have lost too many of those fights.  We have too many low information voters that have put Barack Obama back in office. 

 While we must fight for the best, we must also prepare for the worst.  Unfortunately for America, right now under Obama’s America, we are living in the worst of times.

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• Colorado Democrat: Women Don’t Need Guns If They ‘Feel Like They’re Going To Be Raped’ (conservativebyte.com)
• Laura Ingraham Responds After Colorado Dem Lawmaker Says Women Use Call Boxes, Whistles to Protect Themselves (foxnewsinsider.com)
• 1100 Special Forces Soldiers Sign Letter Supporting the Second Amendment (mikewb1971.wordpress.com)
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Do Gun Control Laws Control Guns? – Thomas Sowell

Do Gun Control Laws Control Guns? – Thomas Sowell 

The gun control controversy is only the latest of many issues to be debated almost solely in terms of fixed preconceptions, with little or no examination of hard facts.

Media discussions of gun control are dominated by two factors: the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment. But the over-riding factual question is whether gun control laws actually reduce gun crimes in general or murder rates in particular.

If, as gun control advocates claim, gun control laws really do control guns and save lives, there is nothing to prevent repealing the Second Amendment, any more than there was anything to prevent repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that created Prohibition.

But, if the hard facts show that gun control laws do not actually control guns, but instead lead to more armed robberies and higher murder rates after law-abiding citizens are disarmed, then gun control laws would be a bad idea, even if there were no Second Amendment and no National Rifle Association.

The central issue boils down to the question: What are the facts? Yet there are many zealots who seem utterly unconcerned about facts or about their own lack of knowledge of facts.

There are people who have never fired a shot in their life who do not hesitate to declare how many bullets should be the limit to put into a firearm’s clip or magazine. Some say ten bullets but New York state‘s recent gun control law specifies seven.

Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting — even if they have never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun. This uninformed and self-righteous dogmatism is what makes the gun control debate so futile and so polarizing.

Anyone who faces three home invaders, jeopardizing himself or his family, might find 30 bullets barely adequate. After all, not every bullet hits, even at close range, and not every hit incapacitates. You can get killed by a wounded man.

These plain life-and-death realities have been ignored for years by people who go ballistic when they hear about how many shots were fired by the police in some encounter with a criminal. As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I am not the least bit surprised by the number of shots fired. I have seen people miss a stationary target at close range, even in the safety and calm of a pistol range.

We cannot expect everybody to know that. But we can expect them to know that they don’t know — and to stop spouting off about life-and-death issues when they don’t have the facts.

The central question as to whether gun control laws save lives or cost lives has generated many factual studies over the years. But these studies have been like the proverbial tree that falls in an empty forest, and has been heard by no one — certainly not by zealots who have made up their minds and don’t want to be confused by the facts.

Most factual studies show no reduction in gun crimes, including murder, under gun control laws. A significant number of studies show higher rates of murder and other gun crimes under gun control laws.

How can this be? It seems obvious to some gun control zealots that, if no one had guns, there would be fewer armed robberies and fewer people shot to death.

But nothing is easier than to disarm peaceful, law-abiding people. And nothing is harder than to disarm people who are neither — especially in a country with hundreds of millions of guns already out there, that are not going to rust away for centuries.

When it was legal to buy a shotgun in London in the middle of the 20th century, there were very few armed robberies there. But, after British gun control zealots managed over the years to disarm virtually the entire law-abiding population, armed robberies became literally a hundred times more common. And murder rates rose.

One can cherry-pick the factual studies, or cite some studies that have subsequently been discredited, but the great bulk of the studies show that gun control laws do not in fact control guns. On net balance, they do not save lives but cost lives.

Gun control laws allow some people to vent their emotions, politicians to grandstand and self-righteous people to “make a statement” — but all at the cost of other people’s lives.

Related articles

• Do Gun Control Laws Control Guns? – Thomas Sowell (conservativeread.com)
• Do gun control laws control guns? (wnd.com)
• Thomas Sowell – Do Gun Control Laws Control Guns? (mypoliticalmusings.wordpress.com)
• City By City Assault On Our Rights (chasvoice.blogspot.com)
• The great gun control fallacy | Thomas Sowell (guardian.co.uk)
• Gun Control Laws to Blame For California’s Rise in Crime (godfatherpolitics.com)

 

NAPOLITANO: The right to shoot tyrants, not deer – Washington Times

NAPOLITANO: The right to shoot tyrants, not deer – Washington Times.

The Second Amendment is the guarantee of freedom

By Andrew P. Napolitano

The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. Yet the progressives in both political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the government to interfere with the exercise of that right by law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by some crazies in our midst.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have operated as a brake on all governments that recognize them by enunciating the concept of natural rights.

As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government. As our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural right is an area of individual human behavior — like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy — immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.

The essence of humanity is freedom. Government — whether voted in peacefully or thrust upon us by force — is essentially the negation of freedom. Throughout the history of the world, people have achieved freedom when those in power have begrudgingly given it up. From the assassination of Julius Caesar to King John’s forced signing of the Magna Carta, from the English Civil War to the triumph of the allies at the end of World War II, from the fall of communism to the Arab Spring, governments have permitted so-called nobles and everyday folk to exercise more personal freedom as a result of their demands for it and their fighting for it. This constitutes power permitting liberty.

The American experience was the opposite. Here, each human being is sovereign, as the colonists were after the Revolution. Here, the delegation to the government of some sovereignty — the personal dominion over self — by each American permitted the government to have limited power in order to safeguard the liberties we retained. Stated differently, Americans gave up some limited personal freedom to the new government so it could have the authority and resources to protect the freedoms we retained. Individuals are sovereign in America, not the government. This constitutes liberty permitting power.

Yet we did not give up any natural rights; rather, we retained them. It is the choice of every individual whether to give them up. Neither our neighbors nor the government can make those choices for us, because we are all without the moral or legal authority to interfere with anyone else’s natural rights. Since the government derives all of its powers from the consent of the governed, and since we each lack the power to interfere with the natural rights of another, how could the government lawfully have that power? It doesn’t. Were this not so, our rights would not be natural; they would be subject to the government’s whims.

To assure that no government would infringe the natural rights of anyone here, the Founders incorporated Jefferson’s thesis underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and, with respect to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As recently as two years ago, the Supreme Court recognized this when it held that the right to keep and bear arms in one’s home is a pre-political individual right that only sovereign Americans can surrender and that the government cannot take from us, absent our individual waiver.

There have been practical historical reasons for the near universal historical acceptance of the individual possession of this right. The dictators and monsters of the 20th century — from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad — have disarmed their people. Only because some of those people resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the dictators for freedom. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes they won.

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.

We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense. (Imagine the howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal sovereignties, they assure that a tyrant can more easily disarm and overcome us.

The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.

Most people in government reject natural rights and personal sovereignty. Most people in government believe that the exercise of everyone’s rights is subject to the will of those in the government. Most people in government believe that they can write any law and regulate any behavior, not subject to the natural law, not subject to the sovereignty of individuals, not cognizant of history’s tyrants, but subject only to what they can get away with.

Did you empower the government to impair the freedom of us all because of the mania and terror of a few?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. He is author of “It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom” (Thomas Nelson, 2011).

The liar in Chief – Tea Party Nation

The liar in Chief – Tea Party Nation.

Posted by Judson Phillips

Barack Obama is the liar in chief.  We know this for any number of reasons.  First, he is a Chicago politician, so you know if his lips are moving, he is lying.  Second, he is a hard-core leftist. 

 How does that prove he is lying?  What is he lying about?

 In 2008, Barack Obama told voters he would not come for their guns.  He said, “When you all go home and you’re talking to your buddies and you say, ah ‘He wants to take my gun away.’  You’ve heard it here,  I’m on television so everybody knows it.  I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.”

Now that he is a lame duck, he wants to follow his heroes, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and make sure the people are disarmed.

The Obama Regime has two strategies for a massive gun control program.  The first is to act by executive order.  Given Obama’s dictatorial dreams, this is certainly his first choice.  He wants to reclassify semi-automatic guns as automatic weapons and therefore illegal under the Gun Control Act of 1968. 

Obama’s second choice is to use his Obamacare strategy.

Obama needed a lot of help getting Obamacare passed.  He could not do it on his own.  So he went the route of crony capitalism.   The Obama Team went to the Drug and Hospital industries and asked them what they wanted. 

Pure and simple: they were bribed to support Obamacare.

Obama is going to go to firearms retailers, such as Wal-Mart and get them onboard by eliminating gun shows. 

Right now, private transactions are not subject to Federal background checks.  This is a huge advantage for these gun shows and many people purchase their weapons at these shows for that very reason.  They do not want the Federal Government to be aware of their firearm purchases. 

Do you blame them?

All the background checks do is give the Feds a map of where to go to start confiscating guns. 

Think that won’t happen?

Remember Katrina?  The local cops went door-to-door confiscating guns. 

The gun-grabbing socialists are making a major push to transform America and we cannot allow this to happen.  The real danger here is a bill they will craft that cannot pass on its own but will be attached in a so-called conference committee to a “must pass” bill.

If somehow a gun control bill passes, this will be the time for real Americans to fight back.   Americans should refuse to obey this bill and have our state legislators pass laws that specifically protect firearms and firearms rights in their state.

For every Congressman and Senator up for reelection in 2014, our message should be simple.  Do anything to interfere with our 2^nd Amendment rights and we are going to end your political career.

The danger here is not simply the loss of our 2^nd Amendment rights. 

 

If the 2^nd Amendment goes, how much longer does the 1^st Amendment have? 

How much longer do any of the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights have?

The Government Cannot Take Away Our Guns – Tea Party Nation

The Government Cannot Take Away Our Guns – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

The government cannot take away our guns. This is not to say it hasn’t tried by means of several thousand laws concerning gun ownership, the right to carry a concealed weapon, and the demand that we undergo background checks to own one.

What I mean is that the act of trying to take our guns would be futile and, were it attempted, would result in an all-out insurrection.

From well before the nation’s independence, won by gun owning militias and a standing army, Americans have always been armed. In the early years of the nation’s history you surely were not going to put meat on the table without one.

Our Founding Fathers were unanimous in their belief that Americans should have the right to bear arms and it is no accident that it is the Second Amendment that guarantees the rights expressed in the First. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

One of the greatest tyrannies, one well known in nations where tyranny is “the law of the land”, is to deprive citizens of gun ownership. It is instructive that the sales of firearms have increased dramatically since Obama was first elected President in 2008. A November 9th CNN news article following his reelection began by noting “Gun sales are up in the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection on Tuesday, driven by fears of tighter regulations under a Democratic president, especially for firearms that might be classified as assault weapons.”

It is no accident that gun sales are up, nor that the most outspoken opponents of gun ownership are Democrats/liberals. When Obama spoke at the Newtown, CT vigil for those killed, he said, “Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm? If we are honest with ourselves, the answer’s no. We’re not doing enough, and we will have to change.” Americans have had four years of “change” under Obama and, despite his reelection by a slim margin, at least half of them don’t like it. The rest are going to like it even less after January 2, 2013.

Obama implied that the school massacre was the result of the many guns owned by Americans and asked if that “is somehow the price of our freedom?” The answer is yes! The constitutional scholar, Joseph Story (1779-1845) noted that “One of the ordinary modes by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance is by disarming the people and making it an offense to keep arms.”

As recently as October 2011, a Gallup poll revealed that “Forty-seven percent of American adults currently report that they have a gun in their home or elsewhere on their property. This is up from 41% a year ago and is the highest Gallup has recorded since 1993, albeit marginally above the 44% and 45% highs seen during that period.” At 47%, reported gun ownership “is the highest it has been in nearly two decades—a finding that may be related to American’s dampened support for gun-control laws.”

So let President Obama, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg try to exploit the Connecticut tragedy to get stronger gun control laws through Congress it’s not likely to happen. Nor has it been lost on many following the story that Connecticut’s current gun laws are among the nation’s strictest. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence ranks the state as second behind California. Simply put, states that permit concealed carry have less rates of crime and homicides than those that do not.

Gun owners must besiege Congress with messages that banning assault weapons or any others will mean a vote against their legislator.

I began by saying that the government cannot take away American’s guns and one need only consider the numbers that own them. Recall the Gallup poll in which nearly half admitted to gun ownership.

James Sterba in his new book, “Nature Wars” about the reforestration of America and the subsequent increase in the numbers of animal species with which we share our suburbs and exburbs, points out that “Each fall some ten million Americans take to forest and field carrying rifles, shotguns, pistols, old-fashioned muzzle-loaded long guns, cross-bows, or long bows and arrows in a display of armed might that would send jittery potentates scrambling for the barricades in less stable parts of the world.”

“Here is an informal army equal to the manpower in the ten largest armed forces in the world—China, United States, India, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Vietnam—combined.”

“Pennsylvania alone fields a force of deer hunters twice the size of the U.S. Army.”

Hunters, city folk and suburbanites who legally own guns in America comprise an army that no President or Congress would want to engage and few legislators anywhere would want to arouse.

President Kennedy perhaps said it best, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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MILLER: Gun-carry ban death rattle – Washington Times

MILLER: Gun-carry ban death rattle – Washington Times.

Illinois forced to allow citizens to carry loaded firearms

By Emily Miller – The Washington Times

New life is being breathed into the Second Amendment. After it was beaten down by activist courts over the decades, the nation’s top justices finally decided two years ago that the founders meant what they wrote.

In McDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court majority held it was unconstitutional for the Windy City to forbid residents to keep handguns in their homes. On Tuesday, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided the phrase in the Bill of Rights about “bearing arms” has meaning as well.

President Obama’s home state of Illinois is the only state with a blanket ban on carrying a handgun outside the home. The court found this prohibition was unconstitutional. As Judge Richard A. Posner wrote, “A woman who is being stalked … has a stronger self-defense claim to be allowed to carry a gun in public than the resident of a fancy apartment building (complete with doorman) has a claim to sleep with a loaded gun under her mattress.”

The judge nodded to the state’s position that a gun is a potential danger to more people in public than if only kept at home, but he added that knowing “many law-abiding citizens are walking the streets armed may make criminals timid.” When the bad guys aren’t sure whether a victim can fight back, they’re less likely to attack.

Alan Gura, attorney for the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), argued on behalf of Michael Moore, an Illinois resident who had been allowed to carry a firearm off duty as a corrections officer but was denied a permit as a civilian jail superintendent.

“Illinois’ ban on carrying a loaded firearm for self-protection is now history, and now no other state can come back and ban carry,” SAF founder Alan Gottlieb told The Washington Times in an interview Tuesday. The court gave the state legislature 180 days to craft a new gun law “with reasonable limitations” on allowing for carry rights.

Mr. Gottlieb said his organization is paying close attention to whether the lawmakers outside Chicago have enough votes to create a “shall issue” state for carry. In the unlikely event that Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn vetoes the bill, the state would default to full carry rights with no restrictions as a result of the decision. “If Illinois puts in an overly restrictive law, we’ll go back to court again,” Mr. Gottlieb warned.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) led the fight as well. Attorney Chuck Cooper argued on behalf of Mary Shepard, who is licensed to carry a concealed handgun in both Utah and Florida but not her home state of Illinois. “This ruling is a major victory for all law-abiding citizens in Illinois and indeed across the country,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. “The Shepard case has paved the way for the people of Illinois to be able to fully exercise their Second Amendment rights.”

Second Amendment activists now need to set their sights on the District, the last outpost where the right to bear arms is not recognized in any way. The D.C. Council should realize it’s only a matter of time before its carry ban is overturned. It should avoid the drawn-out legal battle by giving residents a chance to defend themselves on the mean streets of the District.

Emily Miller is a senior editor for the Opinion pages at The Washington Times.

Related articles

• NRA Calls It A “Victory For Self-Defense” (onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com)
• Federal Court Strikes down Illinois’ total ban on carrying firearms for self-defense outside the home or business (gloucestercitynews.net)
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• Court overturns Illinois concealed carry ban (humanevents.com)
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The UN Gun Control Treaty Is Bad for Gun Owners Everywhere – Chuck Norris – Townhall.com

 

The UN Gun Control Treaty Is Bad for Gun Owners Everywhere – Chuck Norris – Townhall.com.

Last time I checked, Americans were responsible for making our own laws. We do not invite foreign nations to have a say in how we govern ourselves within our own borders. Yet if you follow what’s been going on with the United Nations this year, you know that the USA came perilously close to having other countries dictate our gun laws. And the fight isn’t over yet.

The United Nations has been debating an arms trade treaty for nearly a decade now. Though the treaty is ostensibly focused on military arms, it has long been clear that the majority of U.N. delegates consider our personal firearms to be crying out for international regulation, as well. The focus of the treaty would be a demand that governments regulate the sale and possession of firearms worldwide — all of them, including yours and mine.

Though I believe that firearms should not be in the wrong hands, the proposed terms of this global gun control treaty would overreach wildly into regulating the sale of firearms to law-abiding citizens. In other words, the proposed treaty is a mechanism for Iran and other tyrannical powers to have a say in your gun ownership.

The George W. Bush administration wisely opposed this concept, asserting that any agreement to regulate private gun ownership would represent a threat to our Second Amendment freedoms. This proclamation was the death knell for the first U.N. gun control treaty conference more than 10 years ago.

But bad ideas at the U.N. never go away; they just fade until the political climate changes. Treaty discussions went underground for several years — until the Obama administration announced a willingness to consider a new treaty, as long as the parties operated under “consensus.”

The debate reached a fever pitch during a monthlong marathon negotiation session in July. The goal was to disgorge a treaty in time for the Obama administration to sign it before Election Day. The draft treaty was odious on its face. Among other things, it would have required the United States to “maintain records of all imports and shipments of arms,” register the identity of the “end user” of those firearms and then report the user’s information to a U.N.-based gun registry. In several drafts, the treaty would have mandated that every round of ammunition be tracked globally.

What’s really ironic here is that the United States already has the most comprehensive system in the world for regulating international arms transfers. Other nations could achieve the stated goals of the treaty process by simply emulating our protocols. But the reality is that the treaty was actually intended as a mechanism to submit our unique Second Amendment guarantees to international inspection — and condemnation.

As I have mentioned, the treaty negotiations broke down this summer, and that is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean the U.N. is giving up the fight. It’s just reducing it into smaller pieces. In fact, in late August, an umbrella organization of 23 separate U.N. agencies, known as the Coordinating Action on Small Arms, adopted the first portion of International Small Arms Control Standards. The ISACS text is made up of 33 separate modules, some 800 pages in total. And they’re just getting started.

What can we do? We can ensure that we have a president who will not support the treaty and a Senate that will not ratify it. That’s not a one-time commitment. Remember that once a treaty is enacted, it can be picked up at any time by a president and Senate. There are smaller gun control treaties that have been floating around the Senate for ratification since 1998.

What can you do? You can make sure that you and every freedom-loving American you know is registered to vote. I’m proud to serve as the honorary chairman of Trigger The Vote, the National Rifle Association‘s nonpartisan campaign to register voters who support the Second Amendment. We’ve made it easy on our website; all the tools to register are there, at http://www.TriggerTheVote.org. If you’re already registered, you probably know someone who isn’t. Share the stakes with that person, and urge him or her to join the rolls of informed voters.

Throughout my life, I’ve been committed to preserving our freedom from threats, both foreign and domestic. This proposed U.N. global gun control treaty may not be an “invasion” in the classic sense of the word, but believe me; over time, it represents the potential for encroachment of the greatest kind. Protect your rights by registering to vote today.

Related articles

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Armed against tragedy – Washington Times

Armed against tragedy – Washington Times.

FRC shooting highlights Heller’s fight for concealed-carry rights in D.C.

By Emily Miller – The Washington Times

Liberals are anxious to talk about workplace or school shootings when it suits their political agenda. That’s why the usual suspects are observing a vow of silence regarding Wednesday’s armed attack on the Family Research Council (FRC). This incident puts the debate over the right to bear arms in the District of Columbia into the spotlight.

The nation’s capital maintains an all-out ban on open or concealed carry of any firearm, as it refuses to recognize the Second Amendment right to bear arms outside the home. The deranged shooter at FRC knew he was entering a gun-free zone. The security guard there, Leonardo Johnson, didn’t have the “special police” commission authorizing him to use a gun on the job. As a result, he was shot in the arm as he successfully thwarted what could have been a deadly assault on the pro-family group.

Dick Heller, the District’s most famous security guard, said he thinks Washington’s gun laws made the FRC incident especially dangerous. “Any security guard anywhere else in the country — where we have 49 states that have concealed carry — that security guard could have been carrying,” Mr. Heller told The Washington Times. “If this shooter would have pulled what he did in Maryland, they would have taken him out in a body bag.”

Mr. Heller does have the certification allowing him to carry a firearm lawfully while on the job protecting a downtown office building, but that wasn’t enough. A decade ago, he launched his fight for the right to keep a gun at home, taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

In 2008, Mr. Heller won, ending the 30-year handgun ban in the nation’s capital. While the Heller decision forced Washington to recognize the constitutional right to keep arms, it didn’t deal with the right to bear arms outside the home.

The Second Amendment activist didn’t rest on this high-court victory. His ongoing “Heller 2” case challenges the constitutionality of the District’s mandatory firearm-registration law. In October 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided the burdensome requirements are valid only if the District presents “some meaningful evidence, not mere assertions, to justify” them.

The D.C. Council amended its ordinances in May to ease the registration process. Mr. Heller’s attorney, Richard Gardiner, said a new complaint has been filed in the case and is awaiting the District’s response.

Mr. Heller is also working on “Heller 3” to push for concealed-carry rights in Washington. He sent a letter to Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier informing her he intends “to conceal carry this firearm when I’m off duty on the streets at midnight.” His shift runs from 4 p.m. to midnight.

Violent crime in Washington is up 10 percent over last year, proving that disarming law-abiding citizens hasn’t deterred any criminals. D.C. residents shouldn’t have to wait for unelected judges to force the city to respect the Constitution. The city council should grant carry rights now.

Emily Miller is a senior editor for the Opinion pages at The Washington Times.

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EDITORIAL: U.N. gun grab flops – Washington Times

EDITORIAL: U.N. gun grab flops – Washington Times.

International bureaucrats flub their attempt to create arms control treaty

The United Nations‘ drive to gain control of the international arms trade is a mixed bag. The bad news is that it has the potential to infringe on the legitimate rights of American gun owners. The good news is that the treaty drafting process has been so dysfunctional that whatever emerges has little chance of getting through the U.S. Senate.

The proposed United Nations Arms Transfer Treaty seeks to establish “common international standards for the import, export and transfer” of the billions of dollars of conventional arms traded annually. It would regulate tanks, military vehicles, combat aircraft, warships and missiles.

Any mention of the U.N. and gun control in the same sentence is bound to raise red flags. Not surprisingly, American firearms advocates strongly oppose the agreement. They believe the treaty’s language would be so loose that activist judges or overzealous federal enforcers would find ways to use the agreement to override the Second Amendment. Treaty backers scoff that this would be impossible since the measure applies only to international arms transfers.

Gun owners are right to be wary. The Constitution’s interstate Commerce Clause has been stretched to include all manner of trade that it was not originally intended to cover, and the same logic could be used regarding international commerce. It would not be much of a stretch to suppose activist judges could claim a gun manufactured in the United States that used some foreign components would satisfy a nexus requirement under the treaty. Such an expansive interpretation would be well beyond the stated purpose of the agreement, but that sort of technicality has never stopped determined government regulators.

Another concern is the current fad in liberal legal circles to read international laws, norms and standards into American jurisprudence. A treaty that establishes a framework for limiting, monitoring and reporting arms transfers — which the proposed arms treaty does — could well be applied to U.S. case law by judges enamored with the notion that international agreements somehow reflect a higher state of legal evolution than a musty old document like the Constitution.

Fortunately, the treaty likely won’t get that far. Its drafting committee released the latest language on Tuesday, and it has been watered down significantly. The United States won an important concession to exclude ammunition from the draft, and state-to-state transfers given as aid are also not covered. Left-wing activist groups are annoyed that the treaty is vague and full of loopholes, not the strong, binding agreement they initially sought. There are enough references to human rights issues that rogue states like Syria, North Korea, Iran and Cuba may try to block it.

The draft treaty must also be reviewed, debated, amended and voted on by Friday — a difficult task in itself. If the U.N. manages this, President Obama would have to sign it, which the White House seems poised to do. The treaty wouldn’t be binding on the United States until approved by two-thirds of the Senate. Given the amount of domestic opposition, that’s unlikely. Though it remains to be seen how the final text will turn out, it appears for now that the international gun grabbers aren’t going to get what they want.

The Washington Times

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UN Gun Control Treaty Will Kill Second Amendment » Commentary — GOPUSA

UN Gun Control Treaty Will Kill Second Amendment » Commentary — GOPUSA.

By Floyd and Mary Beth Brown

“Representatives from many of the world’s socialist, tyrannical and dictatorial regimes [are gathering] at the United Nations headquarters in New York for a month-long meeting, in which they’ll put the finishing touches on an international Arms Trade Treaty that could seriously restrict your freedom to own, purchase and carry a firearm,” warns Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA).

It’s happening right now. The member states of the United Nations have been meeting, behind closed doors with Hillary Clinton, since July 2nd to hammer out the final details on their so-called Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) and Barack Obama, has vowed to sign it on July 27th.

If you’re not worried, you should be. Cox goes on to say: “You might think that something so obviously menacing to one of our enumerated fundamental rights would receive a strong rebuke from our top government leaders. But you’d be wrong. This is President Barack Obama’s vision for America, and we’re expected to just go along with it.”

Make no mistake, your constitutional and God-given right to keep and bear arms may forever be regulated and controlled by thugs within the United Nations.

As a matter of policy, President George W. Bush not only opposed the ATT, but also proclaimed that the United States would have no involvement with the planning or implementation of the ATT. He wanted no part of this treasonous treaty.

As Bloomberg news reported, under the Bush Administration, the United States “was the only nation to oppose the 2006 resolution to create an international treaty on the sale of small arms and light weapons, and subsequent measures to continue the talks.”

But the times, they are a changing. Instead of following President Bush’s example and saying, from the get-go, that this voluntary surrender of our constitutional rights will ever see the light of day; Senate Republicans are taking more of a ‘let’s-wait-and-see-what-the-UN-comes-up-with’ approach.

And while Republicans procrastinate, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are legitimizing and actively negotiating something that is illegitimate, a treaty the United States should never be negotiating in the first place.

Make no mistake, our elected officials like to talk tough. As a matter of fact, a number of Senators penned a strongly worded letter on ATT to Barack Obama last year, and they even went so far as to say that they would “oppose ratification of an Arms Trade Treaty presented to the Senate that in any way restricts the rights of law-abiding citizens to manufacture, assemble, possess, transfer or purchase firearms, ammunition and related items.”

Don’t be lulled into complacency by the tough-sounding rhetoric. Words are cheap and anyone who knows how the UN operates knows that its S.O.P. is deception. The ATT will, without a doubt, contain written promises and grandiose assurances and the UN will assure far too many Senate Republicans that the ATT will in no way restrict your right to legally own a firearm.

Once the ATT is signed and ratified our own government, under the supervision of the thugs of the United Nations, will start to “regulate” and, soon thereafter, start to “confiscate.” Don’t take our word for it. Former UN ambassador John Bolton, says that the UN “is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there is no doubt that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control.”

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