U.S. Backs Out & Kills U.N. Arms Treaty

There was a great hope that the United Nations would pass an arms treaty this year, but it now looks like that won't happen. And the primary reason it won't happen is that the United States backed out at the last minute, saying they wanted more time to consider the language of the treaty. And once the United States backed out, Russia and China quickly followed suit. It shouldn't escape attention that these three countries are the largest weapons shippers internationally. The executive director of Amnesty International made the following statement:

"This was stunning cowardice by the Obama administration, which at the last minute did an about-face and scuttled progress toward a global arms treaty, just as it reached the finish line. It's a staggering abdication of leadership by the world's largest exporter of conventional weapons to pull the plug on the talks just as they were nearing an historic breakthrough."

I think that is a true statement. The Obama administration is afraid the arms treaty would have affected the upcoming election, so they backed down. They know the National Rifle Association (NRA) has waged a huge propaganda campaign against the U.N. treaty, and have convinced a lot of Americans that the treaty would somehow override the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and allow the United Nations to confiscate the guns of Americans. It's a ridiculous idea of course, since the arms treaty wouldn't have affected arms possession or sales within any country. It would only have affected the international sales of firearms, in an effort to keep dangerous firearms out of the hands of criminal and terrorist organizations.

And the NRA is bragging that they are responsible for the failure of the arms treaty. They probably are responsible. But it exposes the leadership of the NRA as to who they really support. It's not the Second Amendment or the gun owners in the United States -- because this treaty would not have affected either. The only group it would affect in this country (or any other) is the weapons manufacturers, because they would no longer be able to ship their killing weapons to any country or group without regard to the consequences. If it wasn't already obvious that the NRA has become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the weapons manufacturers, then it should be obvious now.

This treaty could have made the world a little bit safer. But the NRA doesn't care. They only care about the profits of the weapons manufacturers, and they were willing to lie to the American people to protect those profits.