The United Nations, in its quest for global domination, is stepping up its efforts to disarm civilians.  For Americans, this means an all-out assault on the Second Amendment.

America’s heritage of freedom and its tradition of private firearms ownership are intertwined. Without an armed citizenry, America could not have fought, let alone won, the Revolutionary War.

When the British occupation force in Boston sent a column into the countryside in 1775, the purpose was to confiscate a cache of weapons accumulated by the rebels. When the "shot heard round the world" was fired, it was discharged by a citizen-soldier from an unregistered gun.

Recognizing the importance of an armed citizenry for the preservation of freedom, the Founding Fathers adopted the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. There are nine other amendments in the Bill of Rights that guarantee other fundamental rights, but in one respect the right to bear arms is the most fundamental of all since it insures all other rights.

Today’s architects of the new world order also understand the significance of the right to bear arms. But they view such a right as an obstacle in their path, since they recognize that they cannot create an international police state without disarming the people they intend to police. It is not surprising, therefore, that the UN is developing disarmament schemes not just for weapons of mass destruction but for rifles and revolvers and everything in between. "The United Nations’ call for gun control is an affront to our way of life and our constitutional government," Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) told THE NEW AMERICAN last year. "Mixing gun control with internationalism is certain to result in an assault on American rights and liberties."

UN Gun Control Plans

The UN’s current drive for gun control was launched in 1995, when the General Assembly asked then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to appoint a "Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms" for the purpose of preparing a report on that subject. The report was submitted to the current secretary-general, Kofi Annan, in 1997. Annan then forwarded the report to the General Assembly with the recommendation that that body endorse it. The General Assembly did so.

The small arms report claimed that "the excessive and destabilizing accumulation and transfer of small arms and light weapons is closely related to the increased incidence of internal conflicts and high levels of crime and violence" and that "it is, therefore, an issue of legitimate concern for the international community." It characterized as "small arms" not only such weapons as "revolvers and self-loading pistols" and "rifles and carbines" but "clubs, knives and machetes."

The report’s recommendations included:

• "The United Nations should support … all appropriate post-conflict initiatives related to disarmament and demobilization, such as the disposal and destruction of weapons, including weapons turn-in programmes...."

• "All … weapons which are not under legal civilian possession, and which are not required for the purposes of national defence and internal security, should be collected and destroyed by States as expeditiously as possible."

• "All States should determine in their national laws and regulations which arms are permitted for civilian possession and the conditions under which they can be used."

• "All States should ensure that they have in place adequate laws, regulations and administrative procedures to exercise effective control over the legal possession of small arms and light weapons and over their transfer...."

• "States emerging from conflict should, as soon as practicable, impose or reimpose licensing requirements on all civilian possession of small arms and light weapons...."

The U.S. government could not implement the proposals in the small arms report, of course, without violating the Second Amendment. Yet the U.S. representative on the Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms — Dr. Herbert L. Calhoun of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency — joined the other panel members in unanimously adopting the small arms report.

In 1998, Secretary-General Annan, once again acting at the request of the General Assembly, appointed another small arms "Experts" panel with a slightly different name: "The Group of Governmental Experts on Small Arms." This new study group was commissioned to prepare a report on the progress made on the recommendations in the 1997 report as well as to make further recommendations. The "Group of Governmental Experts" submitted its report in August 1999. As before, the U.S. representative on the Group was Dr. Calhoun; the Group adopted the report unanimously; and Annan endorsed the report and sent it to the General Assembly.

The Group’s small arms report noted a number of gun control initiatives in various countries, including strengthened gun control laws, weapons turn-in and destruction programs, and even "a United Nations weapons collection pilot project in the Albanian district of Gramsh, which is aimed at the voluntary surrender of weapons by civilians in exchange for community development assistance." The Group recommended: "States should work towards the introduction of appropriate national legislation, administrative regulations and licensing requirements that define conditions under which firearms can be acquired, used and traded by private persons. In particular, they should consider the prohibition of unrestricted trade and private ownership of small arms and light weapons...."

In February of this year, U.S. State Department senior advisor John Holum (a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) approvingly noted that "the experts’ studies produced by the U.N. during the past five years have helped members [of the UN] better understand the scope of the problem, assess implementation efforts, and determine priorities for action." Addressing a Washington, D.C. "Small Arms Working Group Meeting," he credited the United States with being "a leader on this issue" and pointed out that "the U.S. has destroyed or assisted in the destruction of weapons stockpiles in a number of countries, including Liberia, Albania, Kuwait, Haiti, and Panama."

Holum also noted that "current U.N. efforts" vis-à-vis small arms "will culminate with the international conference in 2001 in New York to address the illicit arms trade in all its aspects. This Conference will be used to galvanize international attention and draw up a ‘global action plan’ to address the problem. Preparations for that Conference begin this month in New York." Indeed they did. State Department official Lee A. Feinstein (CFR), who led the U.S. delegation at the February "Preparatory Committee" for the conference, made clear that "you can count on the full backing of the United States in supporting this very important endeavor." Feinstein continued: "We are grateful to the United Nations, which has put this issue on the international agenda, beginning with the first report of the Government Panel of Experts in 1997...."

Part of a Broader Plan

The increasingly transparent and aggressive push for civilian disarmament is an important element in a broader, step-by-step program to grant a UN "peace" force and subservient national security forces a monopoly of power. The totalitarian objective behind the UN’s domestic disarmament and international disarmament schemes are the same. That objective is not to eliminate all weapons (be they nuclear bombs or small arms), but to transfer their control to the custodians of the emerging global police state.

As William F. Jasper pointed out in the previous article (page 10), the U.S. government has made the simultaneous strengthening of the UN and disarming of nations official U.S. policy, first in Freedom From War and then in Blueprint for the Peace Race. Although these State Department documents do not address the question of civilian disarmament, it is notable that both the 1997 and 1999 UN "Experts" reports on small arms place that subject under the broader UN agenda of "general and complete disarmament" — a phrase that also figures prominently in the subtitles of the two State Department documents.

It is also revealing that the UN-funded Commission on Global Governance (CGG) explicitly addressed civilian as well as international disarmament in its report entitled Our Global Neighborhood. (That much-heralded report appeared in 1995, the same year the current UN push for gun control began.) Under the chapter heading "Promoting Security," the CGG claimed: "Militarization today not only involves governments spending more than necessary to build up their military arsenals. It has increasingly become a global societal phenomenon, as witnessed by the rampant acquisition and use of increasingly lethal weapons by civilians — whether individuals seeking a means of self-defense, street gangs, criminals, political opposition groups, or terrorist organizations." That is, in the view of the CGG even civilians "seeking a means of self-defense" constitute a security threat — just like "street gangs" or "criminals."

"Every effort must be made on the local and community level as well as at the international level to … sow the seeds of a culture of non-violence," stated the CGG. Among its recommendations: "encourage the disarmament of civilians"! If the global architects behind this UN power grab are successful, the disarmed civilians will be not only Albanians or Haitians, but Americans.