U.N. finalizing arms treaty to regulate weapons transfers worldwide

As we’ve seen time and again, the United Nations is little more than an ineffective, morally squishy, highly corrupted joke of an international bureaucracy that in the long run has done hardly anything productive in stabilizing global affairs or promoting lasting peace. Honestly, why do we contribute funding (and the lion’s share, at that!) to this globalist boondoggle? So we can be lectured about how our economic prowess is ostensibly creating a climate emergency while China sits smugly on their Human Rights Council? Thanks, but I’ll pass on the proffered guilt trip.

Throughout the month, the United Nations is working on an arms treaty ostensibly aimed at reducing violence that has America’s pro-Second Amendment crowd up in arms. While President Bush was reliably resistant to heeding the U.N. on the idea (bravo!), President Obama reversed U.S. policy on that score in 2009 by bringing the U.S. back to the bargaining table:

International talks in New York are going on throughout July on the final wording of the so-called Arms Trade Treaty, which supporters such as Amnesty International USA say would rein in unregulated weapons that kill an estimated 1,500 people daily around the world. But critics, including the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre, warn the treaty would mark a major step toward the eventual erosion of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment gun-ownership rights. …

While the treaty’s details are still under discussion, the document could straitjacket U.S. foreign policy to the point where Washington could be restricted from helping arm friends such as Taiwan and Israel…

LaPierre says the treaty that is likely to emerge will have the effect of squeezing individual gun owners in the United States and elsewhere by imposing on them an onerous collection of regulations. …

“The world’s worst human rights abusers will end up voting for this, while the Obama administration has not drawn a line in the sand like the previous administration did. Instead, it is trying to be a part of this train wreck because they think they can somehow finesse it. But, to me, there is no finessing the individual freedoms of American citizens.”

The United Nations can’t manage to get its act together on cracking down on genocide, terrorism, and human rights abuses, but we’re to trust them to orchestrate regulations that would clash with our own policies? I can’t see that working out well, and I’ll go ahead and make a wild guess that somewhere down the road this would end up benefiting dictatorial regimes while depriving good citizens of the fundamental right to bear arms.

Even if President Obama could get behind the idea, our current Congress won’t — and seeing how the Senate has to ratify treaties, I don’t foresee the U.S. signing on to this. Preach it, Mr. LaPierre:

Oops: In my last paragraph, I originally wrote that “Congress” has to ratify treaties — I’ve clarified it to just the Senate above!

• Chuck Todd: The Obama administration is trying to “criminalize journalism”
• About those “doctored” Benghazi e-mails…
• White House word of the day – Irrelevant

Blowback