Lawrence Auster
Wednesday, July 18, 2001

While that imbalance makes it sound as if the U.N. may be deliberately minimizing the participation of pro-gun groups, one pro-gun NGO source told NewsMax: "A half-hour was more than our share. We had enough time."

Most importantly, the pro-gun minority had a chance to question the central dogma of the conference: Guns themselves cause violence, as well as many other social ills such as poverty. This orthodox view was stated by (among many others) Dr. Vyacheslav Sharov of the Russian Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War:

"The capacity of small arms and light weapons to destabilize regions and to threaten the fabric of societies is directly related to their power to injure, to intimidate and to kill."

Think of what Dr. Sharov is saying: Guns alone have the power to destabilize and intimidate. Guns alone have the power to kill.

The same idea can be found in the following text from one of the multipaneled displays on the lower level of the General Assembly building:

"Light weapons circulate easily into communities at peace, where they are often put to criminal use. Their widespread availability militarizes civil societies and fosters cultures of violence."

"In Colombia, the wide availability of small arms is responsible for some 20,000 deaths yearly ..."

Once again, guns alone "militarize" countries and produce all this misery and disorder. It is as though firearms are independent beings that move around the world at will, and whenever they arrive someplace in sufficient numbers, turn otherwise peaceful nations into battle zones. Human beings have nothing to do with it. It is the guns that are the real actors.

Contesting this irrational myth, Tony Bernardo of the Canadian Institute for Legislative Action pointed out that Canada has the highest rate of firearms ownership in the world and the longest unarmed border. This, he argued, proves that gun ownership in itself does not make a society violent. Nor, said Bernardo, are firearms the cause of poverty, since Canada has very little poverty.

Similarly, Joachim Streitberger of the Forum Waffenrecht in Germany said that there are 10 million private firearms in Germany, yet 99 percent of crime is not committed with legal guns. Even the 20 million illegal guns in Germany are rarely used in crimes. According to Streitberger, there is no relationship between small arms accumulation and civil conflict. It is civil conflict that attracts firearms, not the mere presence of firearms that causes conflict.

These voices of common sense were overshadowed somewhat by the greater number of anti-gun NGO speakers and the enthusiastic support they received. The biggest applause during the three-hour meeting, indeed a standing ovation, went to Mary Leigh Blek of the Million Mom March, whose 21-year-old son Matthew was killed in what she described as "this war raging within our United States borders."

What Mrs. Blek probably meant was that her son was murdered by a criminal who should have been in jail. But in the liberal and U.N. view of things, criminals are not actors responsible for their acts, nor are local law-enforcement officials responsible for suppressing criminals; the only responsible actors are the guns themselves.

Her son, Blek said, "is joined by 10 children and teens who die each and every day to gun violence and trauma made possible by the easy access and availability of guns in our country." She did not mention that the "10 children and teens" to whom she was referring consist overwhelmingly of criminals in teen gangs who kill each other, not of innocent victims.

Blek also said the following: "The U.S. official report to this body does not represent the thinking of the American public. The Bolton position is the minority position of a minority government." Thus, much like Bill Clinton, who organized an anti-American protest in England, Blek attacked the legitimacy of her own country's government before an international audience.

Dr. Natalie Goldring, director of the Security and Disarmament Program at the National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives in Washington, D.C., urged a "Global Transparency Regime" in which the status of every gun in every country in the world would be known by the U.N. One can only wonder if the U.N.'s own power will be equally visible to the people it holds under its sway. (I will have more to say on the real meaning of "transparency" in an article later this week.)

Another speaker was Anna Ward of the Unitarian Universalist Association of USA and Canada, who said the real problem is not guns but poverty, racism and sexism. This was a curious comment, since most of the conference speakers and documents have claimed that it is the proliferation of firearms in a society that causes poverty, racism and sexism. Ward, by contrast, was saying that poverty, racism and sexism cause the proliferation of guns.

However the global gun controllers spin it, one thing remains consistent in their propaganda: Actual human societies, along with their constitutive laws, customs and moral standards, are not responsible for gun violence, and therefore they cannot be expected to stop gun violence. Only the U.N. has the capacity to do that, through an unaccountable system of global governance.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Guns/Gun Control
United Nations

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