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Hollywood Lobbies U.N. on Gun Control Kenneth R. Timmerman NEW YORK CITY -- An international coalition of anti-gun groups called on Hollywood to convince a U.N. conference in New York to impose legally-binding United Nations controls over small arms and personal firearms. Flanked by Hollywood director Andrew Niccol, advocates from ControlArms, SaferWorld, and the International Action Network on Small Arms, IANSA, hosted a cocktail party at the United Nations headquarters building Tuesday night, followed by a viewing of Niccol's 2005 film, "Lord of War." The film, starring Nicolas Cage, is a searing portrayal of an American gun-runner who criss-crosses Africa, supplying warlords and heads of state with a variety of weaponry. After dodging bullets and Interpol agents seeking his arrest, Cage returns to his multi-million dollar Manhattan condo and his trophy wife, just like any international businessman. "Cars and cigarettes kill more people than guns," he says at one point. "I simply give people the means to defend themselves." The only problem with the film's scarcely-veiled condemnation of international arms traffickers is that Cage's behavior is more harshly regulated in the United States than in virtually any other country around the world, according to the anti-gun lobbyists themselves. Story Continues Below
Brian Wood, a top arms trade analyst for Amnesty International and ControlArms, told anti-gun activists in New York that the arms dealers who have supplied Africa's most brutal war lords over the past decade were French, Russian and Ukrainian - not American. "Only 30 countries in the world have laws that regulate arms brokering," he said. They include the 25 European Union nations, Nicaragua, Israel, Japan, South Africa – and the United States. "And that's it," Wood said. Victor Bout, who became famous for running guns into improvised air strips in Africa in exchange for raw diamonds, is a Russian national. Leonid Minin, arrested in Milan, Italy on August 5, 2000 for selling arms to the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, is from Ukraine. "Arms brokers use the weakest links in the system," Wood said. "A lot of the most damaging cases involve siphoning off surpluses, especially in Central Asia and certain countries in Eastern Europe." He lauded two nations for "a high degree of extra-territorial application" of their national arms brokering laws, South Africa and the United States. Nevertheless, anti-gun activists made clear at week-long meetings in New York to prepare this summer's UN Small Arms and Light Weapons conference, that their goal was to place legally-binding international restrictions on the possession of personal firearms and the international arms trade. "I was in Sierre Leone," British activist Anthea Lawson, a spokesperson for IANSA, told Newsmax. "How can I explain to people who have gone through incredible suffering because of small arms that NRA [National Rifle Association] concerns are blocking an international agreement that would make lots of people safer?" International gun control was necessary, she argued, "because the legal trade in weapons is where the illegal trade begins. The weapons themselves all come out of the legal trade." In Africa's worst killing spree in modern history, an estimated 500,000 Tutsis were massacred by rival Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda in 1994. But the weapons used were machetes, not firearms. Former U.S. Congressman Bob Barr, who is serving as an unpaid advisor to the U.S. delegation to the conference, said that the goal of the non-government organizations and the countries supporting them "is to take away the freedom we possess in our country to possess firearms." Just as anti-gun control advocates in the United States, the international NGOs were "focusing on the instrument, not on the underlying problem," he told NewsMax. "It's relatively easy to get a handle on the true problem, which is how do you prevent military weapons from getting into the hands of rogue regimes and genocidal maniacs." The Bush administration has set out several "red lines" that the United States would not cross, he said. "We will allow no discussion, no negotiation, over civilian possession of firearms," Barr said. Nor will the U.S. agree to any U.N. effort to impose binding U.N. controls on what "non-state actors" a member state will supply with weapons. "We feel it's the prerogative of the president of the United States to decide what groups to support," Barr said. "There could be freedom fighters in ‘Freedonia' we find it in our interest to arm." Countries backing the effort to place legally-binding international restrictions on the trade in small arms include Canada, which hosted a presentation by Amnesty International at the United Nations, Britain, Mexico, Japan, the Netherlands, and Brazil.
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