The United Nations: Pressing for U.S. Gun Control

[3n00n]

By: Executive Director

Gun Owners of America

Why should gun owners concern themselves with the United Nations? After all, what jurisdiction do U.N. bureaucrats have for sticking their nose into the U.S. gun control debate since the United States Constitution gives no authority of any kind to the U.N?

To answer that question, it might help to ask another question. By what authority is the United States Congress (and the rest of the federal government) passing one bill after another to disarm, one step at a time, the civilian population of the country?

Clearly, gun control (or more plainly called civilian disarmament, which is what concerned the founders) is prohibited by the Second Amendment. In reality, the Second Amendment was specifically intended to protect an individual's right to own the type of firearms in "common use." Consider the statement by the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Miller (1939):

"The Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense... [and that] when called for service, these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time."

So what is one to conclude from all this? First, the Constitution gives Congress no authority to enact gun control legislation.

Second, and perhaps even more surprising for modern-day pundits, the Constitution allows the Congress to require gun ownership. Consider a law which Congress passed in 1792 -- a law which is clearly authorized by the "arming and discipliningthe militia" clause in the Constitution:

In the Militia Act of 1792, the second Congress defined "militia of the United States" to include almost every free adult male in the United States.

These persons were obligated by law to possess a [military-style] firearm and a minimum supply of ammunition and militaryequipment....

The above quote comes from a statement issued in 1982 by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution. The subcommitteecorrectly observed that Congress can require gun ownership.

The governing principle of what authority the federal government has is stated in the Tenth Amendment: "The powers notdelegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

In other words, if an explicit grant of power is not authorized in the Constitution, the federal government may not act.

"We the people of the United States" have not held our politicians accountable. As with undisciplined children, they have been doing whatever they feel like rather than operate according to the rules.

Not surprisingly, these same politicians have no problem with the United Nations telling Americans what to do without authority since the federal government has been doing the same thing for a long time. Involvement by the U.N. is actually politically quite convenient as long as voters do not object.

From the Horse's Mouth

The documents from the U.N.'s own webpage: http://www.un.org make it clear that they are very serious about disarming American civilians.

For example, on December 22, 1995, the UN announced the launch of a study of small arms. According to the U.N., small arms "are increasingly associated with crime, accidents and suicides, and form a major source of illicit profits for transnational criminal networks.... While trade in major weapons is on the decline, small arms are spreading." Thatsounds like something Sarah Brady or Rep. Charles Schumer, among others, could have written.

This worldwide survey of firearms ownership is being financed by the Japanese government. The Canadian government is supplying a number of gun control bureaucrats to assist in the U.N. project. Also participating is Stewart Allen, Chief of the Intelligence Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms along with the Russian in charge of the Firearms Control Division of the Russian Ministry of the Interior.

The survey is being done, according to a December 22, 1995 press release from the U.N., in cooperation with U.S. police, customs and military services. The Clinton Administration evidently is hoping to use the U.N. study to lend support to its own desire to disarm American citizens. This is the function assigned to similar studies voted by Congress over the years including the instant background check with its establishment of the means of instant gun registration when background checks are carried out.

The Congress passed a study resolution mandating the Justice Department to study the issue. Not surprisingly, the bureaucrats concluded that they should have this increased power over the citizens and the additional information about who has guns. Following the study, the Brady Law was passed with its instant background (registration) features firmly implanted in the legislation.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali spoke of a world "awash" with small arms. The Japanese got the U.N. to approve a resolution authorizing the U.N. Crime Commission to consider various measures to regulate guns. Several of the member governments spoke of the "alarming rise in the proliferation of small arms and underscored that their mounting use by drug traffickers and criminal gangs posed a grave threat to public safety and the rule of law." The same sinister depiction of guns as only used by drug dealers is the same rhetoric employed in the U.S. by Handgun Control and their champions in the Congress and other government bodies.

An earlier draft of the resolution would have encouraged the U.N. Secretary-General "to continue efforts to curb the illicit circulation of small arms and to collect such arms in the affected States, with the support of the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Africa."

While that resolution was dealing with Africa, Americans should not be relieved that the U.S. was not included -- in that resolution. The fact of the matter is, the U.N. is increasingly assuming the jurisdictional authority of a federal world government with the U.S. as just one of scores of member states. And gun control -- meaning civilian disarmament -- is high up on the agenda of the U.N.

New Focus, Same Goals

With the end of the Cold War, the U.N. has shifted its focus to gun control and fighting drugs as a way of continuing to justify its existence. We see the same pattern of big government refocusing in the United States using the same themes of a war on drugs and gun control.

The U.N. Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice met in Vienna in May, 1996 to discuss strategies for civilian disarmament among the member states. In announcing this summit, U.N. bureaucrats set forth what they perceived to be a major problem -- namely, that "small arms are spreading throughout society with little documentation, since they are frequently bought from private individuals." Thus, one of the commission's objectives was to study gun control laws around the world for "the development of related strategies" among the member countries (like the U.S.).

Since most countries register gun owners, one would undoubtedly expect that the "related strategies" would include registering all guns so that the U.N. and the subordinate governments (including the U.S.) will know where the guns are. No more anonymous gun sales with "little documentation." No more passing a gun down from father to son. No more selling a gun to a friend at the office. Big Brother will track everything pertaining to guns.

This alone is reason for gun owners and all who are working to restore constitutional government in the United States to rejoice that Rep. Ron Paul has introduced H.R. 1146, The American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 1997.

In brief, H.R. 1146 would get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.

Gun control illustrates one of the dangers of the U.S. membership in the U.N. In May of 1994, the Clinton administration agreed to participate in a discussion of ways for the United Nations to control the manufacture of guns and their sales to civilians. This is over a year before all of the activities of the U.N. Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice swung into motion with financial support from Japan and bureaucrats on loan from our neighbor, Canada. These other countries were not sneaking in the back door of U.S. sovereignty -- our own government was hiding behind the U.N. to carry out the civilian disarmament they did not think they could get away with by themselves.

In the May 24, 1994 issue of The Washington Times discussing the U.S. support of U. N. gun control, Colombia's U.N. representative was complaining about the U.S. as a source of guns to Columbia in much the same way that Washington, D.C. complains about some of the states:

"Columbia's problem is that in the U.S. you can legally buy and sell arms, and those arms then are transferred illegally out of the country. But in Columbia, any purchase of arms is illegal." Pretty soon we will be told that we need a "one-gun-a-month" rationing scheme to stop the flow of guns not just to poor crime-wracked Washington, D.C., but to drug-lord oppressed Colombia.

The enemies of an armed citizenry have already shown that in order to pull off gun rationing, they need to have an instant registration system in place, such as the Brady instant background check. Hardly anybody thinks that criminals buy guns in ways that subject themselves to background checks, but that is not what Handgun Control (better called, Allgun Control), Inc. is after. They want to know who has the guns. And so does the U.N.

Less Sovereignty Can Lead to More Gun Control

The web of international organizations being spun around the United States has already begun to reveal a transfer of sovereignty from our national government to unelected, supra-national organizations. When the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) Treaty was being adopted, proponents declared that treaty language would prohibit any part of the treaty from having effect if it would be inconsistent with any law of the United States. But other advocates, such as House Speaker Newt Gingrich, were more candid. He likened GATT to the Maastricht treaty governing much of Europe, by which individual states have surrendered an unprecedented degree of sovereignty.

Gingrich said that we need "to be honest about the fact that we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization. This is a transformational moment." (Human Events, 11/25/94, p.4)

Another candid advocate of the GATT's transfer of sovereignty to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was William Holder, the Deputy General Counsel of the International Monetary Fund who told an American University audience on November 19, 1994: "The WTO is de jure [legally] world government."

Article 16, paragraph 4 of the WTO charter (which is part of the GATT legislation) states that each government "shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures with its obligations..."

We have seen in our own country how the interstate commerce clause of Article I Section 8 of our constitution went from being the delegation of a limited power (to keep states from taxing each other) to a "justification" of nearly totalitarian federal power to regulate anything at all. The argument was, that something that is not moving in interstate commerce hasnegatively impacted interstate commerce. Thus, something you grow for yourself on your own land, the feds have asserted, is game for federal regulation under the commerce clause.

If that kind of fallacious and dangerous thinking has held sway in the United States, what makes us think that assumptions of international government power even worse than we have inflicted on ourselves domestically will not be imposed on the United States by the U.N. and other "entangling alliances" that George Washington warned us against.

We have seen from the discussions under way at the United Nations that gun control is one of the top agenda items of the U.N. and many foreign nations.

The U.S. gun laws are much freer than those of most of the rest of the world. Through the web of entangling treaties attaching the U.S. to various international organizations, the rope is being slipped about the neck of the Second Amendment. One of these days, we may wake up to headlines that the U.N. or the WTO have demanded that the U.S. "harmonize" its gun laws (translation: disarm our civilians the way Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and many others have).

Hopefully, if that time ever comes, H.R. 1146 will have already been made law and the U.S. will have broken its entangling alliance with the U.N. Members of Congress need to be encouraged to cosponsor this legislation by Rep. Ron Paul. For a quantity of postcards to have sent to your congressman, contact GOA at 703 321 8585 (8001 Forbes Place, Springfield, VA 22151) or e-mail your request to:

goamail@gunowners.org This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

© 2009 by Gun Owners of America http://gunowners.org/membership.htm

8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151 - Phone: 703-321-8585 - Fax: 703-321-8408

The information contained herein may be disseminated for non-commercial purposes as long as credit is given to GOA.

[North Pack]

GREAT FREAKIN' POST, - A MUST READ, ...

[gamo2hammerli]

Excellent post.  Sadly the anti-gunners will never read this.....even if it's shoved into their face.  And if they read it....they would say those "Right to bear arms...." rules are outdated.......and should be scraped.  SHEEPS

[3n00n]

Mexican drug war in US

By: PAULINE ARRILLAGA, AP

COLUMBIANA, Ala. – Five men dead in an apartment. In a county that might see five homicides in an entire year, the call over the sheriff's radio revealed little about what awaited law enforcement at a sprawling apartment complex.

A type of crime, and criminal, once foreign to this landscape of blooming dogwoods had arrived in Shelby County. Sheriff Chris Curry felt it even before he laid eyes on the grisly scene. He called the state. The FBI. The DEA. Anyone he could think of.

"I don't know what I've got," he warned them. "But I'm gonna need help."

The five dead men lay scattered about the living room of one apartment in a complex of hundreds.

Some of the men showed signs of torture: Burns seared into their earlobes revealed where modified jumper cables had been clamped as an improvised electrocution device. Adhesive from duct tape used to bind the victims still clung to wrists and faces, from mouths to noses.

As a final touch, throats were slashed open, post-mortem.

It didn't take long for Curry and federal agents to piece together clues: A murder scene, clean save for the crimson-turned-brown stains now spotting the carpet. Just a couple of mattresses tossed on the floor. It was a typical stash house.

But the cut throats? Some sort of ghastly warning.

Curry would soon find this was a retaliation hit over drug money with ties to Mexico's notorious Gulf Cartel.

Curry also found out firsthand what federal drug enforcement agents have long understood. The drug war, with the savagery it brings, knows no bounds. It had landed in his back yard, in the foothills of the Appalachians, in Alabama's wealthiest county, around the corner from The Home Depot.

One thousand, twenty-four miles from the Mexico border.

___

Forget for a moment the phrase itself — "War on Drugs" — much-derided since President Richard Nixon coined it. Wars eventually end, after all. And many Americans wonder today, nearly four decades later, will this one ever be won?

In Mexico, the fight has become a real war. Some 45,000 Mexican army troops now patrol territories long ruled by narcotraffickers. Places like Tijuana, in the border state of Baja California. Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from Texas. Ciudad Juarez, next door to El Paso. But also the central state of Michoacan and resort cities like Acapulco, an hour south of the place where, months ago, the decapitated bodies of 12 soldiers were discovered with a sign that read:

"For every one of mine that you kill, I will kill 10."

Some 10,560 people have been killed since 2006, the year Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office and launched his campaign against the organized crime gangs that move cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and heroin to a vast U.S. market. Consider that fewer than 4,300 American service members have died in the six-year war in Iraq.

The cartels are fighting each other for power, and the Calderon administration for their very survival. Never before has a Mexican president gone after these narco-networks with such force.

"He has deployed troops. He has deployed national police. He's trying to vet and create units ... that can effectively adjudicate and turn back the years of corruption," says John Walters, who directed the Office of National Drug Control Policy for seven years under President George W. Bush. "These groups got more powerful, and when there was less visible destruction, it was because they were in control; they were stable. Now, he has destabilized them."

Walters sees this as an "opportunity to change — for better, or worse — the history of our two countries fundamentally."

And now the cartels have brought the fight to us: In 230 U.S. cities, the Mexican organizations maintain distribution hubs or supply drugs to local distributors, according to the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center.

Places like Miami and other longtime transportation points along the California, Arizona and Texas borders. But also Twin Falls, Idaho. Billings, Mont. Wichita, Kan. Phoenix. St. Louis. Milwaukee.

Even Shelby County.

The quintuple homicide occurred just outside the Birmingham city limits and a half-hour's drive north of Columbiana, the county seat.

"We became a hub without knowing it," Sheriff Curry says. "We've got to wake people up because we're seeing it all over the place. It is now firmly located throughout this country."

The talk of the day is "spillover" violence — at once the stuff of sensationalism but also a very real concept.

In Phoenix, the nation's fifth-largest city, police report close to 1,000 kidnappings over the past three years tied to border smuggling, be it human or drugs or both. The rise parallels a shift in illegal immigrant crossings from California and Texas to the Arizona border, where many of the same gangs transporting people transport drugs. The perpetrators are often after ransom money, for a drug load lost or from a family that paid to have a relative brought over.

The problem has earned the city the unfortunate distinction of "America's kidnapping capital" in some media accounts, even though the incidents are mostly out of sight and out of mind for law-abiding residents and overall crime, including homicides, was down last year.

In Atlanta, which has grown into a major distribution hub for the Gulf Cartel, trafficker-on-trafficker violence has become more common as the cartels, in the face of Calderon's crackdown, impose tighter payment schedules and grow less tolerant of extending credit, says Rodney Benson, chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration there.

Benson blames that, in part, for the much-publicized kidnapping last summer in the middle-class Atlanta suburb of Lilburn, not far from Stone Mountain Park. Acting on a tip, agents found a Dominican man chained to a wall in the basement of a house, severely dehydrated and badly beaten. He had been lured from Rhode Island because he apparently owed $300,000 in drug debts.

"Money wasn't paid," Benson says. "They were going to kill him."

Greg Borland heads the DEA office in Birmingham. Since the murders last August, he's seen the fear in his neighbors' eyes, and faced their questions: How did this happen? Why here? Why now?

"They're absolutely shocked. To me it's like: Why? It's everywhere. Unless you have a 50-foot wall around your town, no one should feel immune from this. The citizen in me says, `I can't believe this is happening in my town.' But the cop in me says, `Well, it's only a matter of time' ... because there are high-level drug traffickers in the area.

"Maybe," he says, "it was only by the grace of God that it hadn't happened already."

Those in the know understand that this kind of violence is nothing new. In border communities that have long been trafficking hubs it's uncommon not to hear of a drug-related crime on the evening news.

What's new is where that violence is erupting, where distribution cells and hubs and sub-hubs have surfaced. How an apartment in Alabama became the site of a drug hit in many ways tells the story of the narco-trade in America in 2009, and of the challenges we face in combatting a blight that has spread to big cities and small all across the land.

___

Before Aug. 20, 2008, when the five men were found, the assumption had been that the big drug hauls were passing through Shelby County and on to cities with larger markets.

Alabama had long had its share of street dealers. Homegrown pot passed hands. Then powder cocaine and crack. Soon meth labs cropped up here and there. "Just a local issue," says Curry.

"There weren't really any traffickers in our county. But over time it's escalated into a sophisticated transportation structure that moves marijuana, moves powder cocaine and now moves crystal meth."

First came the rise of the Mexican cartel, brought about in the late '80s and early '90s after authorities cracked down on Colombian traffickers and choked off routes along the Caribbean and in South Florida. The Colombians aligned with the Mexicans for transportation, then began paying their Mexican subcontractors in cocaine.

As more Colombian traffickers were brought down, the Mexicans took over both transportation and distribution. A decade ago, 60 percent of the cocaine entering the United States came through Mexico. Today that figure is 90 percent.

Texas and other border states become primary distribution hubs. Greg Bowden, who heads the FBI's violent crime task force in Birmingham, worked four years in the Texas border city of Brownsville. He remembers cases involving Alabama dealers who would fly into Houston, rent a car, pick up loads at a warehouse or mall parking lot and drive back home.

"(Distributors) felt comfortable in Texas. That was their home base, and has been for a long time. Now," says Bowden, "they're comfortable here, in Memphis, in Atlanta. They moved their home bases to these little pockets."

One reason for that shift is the ability these days to "blend in in plain sight," as the Atlanta DEA chief puts it. The flood of Hispanic immigrants into American communities to work construction and plant jobs helped provide cover for traffickers looking to expand into new markets or build hubs in quiet suburbs with fewer law officers than the big cities.

Shelby has long been Alabama's fastest-growing county, with its proximity to Birmingham, good schools and a growing corporate corridor along Highway 280. The number of Hispanics grew 126 percent from 2000 to 2007. It was once rare to see a Latino face at the local Wal-Mart or gas station. Now, dozens upon dozens of Hispanic day laborers line Lorna Road in the northern part of the county.

As Bowden says, "You don't stand out."

But there is another reason this area, and others, have become what some agents call "sub-hubs."

With some 4.9 million trucks crossing into the United States from Mexico every year, tractor-trailers have become a transportation mode of choice among traffickers. Drugs head north, but weapons and cash also head back south — like the $400,000 Border Patrol agents found on April 2 near Las Cruces, N.M., stashed in the refrigeration unit of a semi.

Shelby County is a trucking mecca, with highways 65, 20, 59 and 459 running east to Atlanta, north to Nashville, south to New Orleans, west to Dallas. Once reluctant to haul drug shipments too far beyond a border state, drivers are willing to take more chances now, because there are so many trucks on the road, Bowden says.

Since January, 27 people were sentenced in Alabama federal court in just one case for using tractor-trailers to transport cocaine and marijuana from Mexico across the border to Brownsville, then up through Birmingham on I-65 to northern Alabama for distribution. Investigators seized 77 pounds of cocaine during the investigation — more than the DEA seized in the entire state of Alabama in all of 1999. The scheme, according to an indictment, had operated since 2004.

Amid all of this, an operation moved into Shelby County, leading to the call on Aug. 20.

A simple welfare check brought deputies to the Cahaba Lakes Apartments off Highway 280, down the road from upscale Vestavia Hills, whose motto is "A Better Place to Live."

The victims were Hispanic, all illegal immigrants. Interviews with family members and associates helped investigators piece together a sketchy portrait of what happened.

Agents described it as friendly competition turned deadly among a group of distributors from Atlanta and Birmingham that often sold and shared drug loads when one or the other group was running low. At some point, about a half-million in drug money went missing. One group suspected the other of taking it, and went after the five men at Cahaba Lakes.

The money was never found.

Whether an order came directly from Mexico, or the decision was made down the food chain, investigators don't know.

The DEA's Borland notes that making a direct connection between the street level distributors charged in the killing and a specific cartel boss back in Mexico isn't easy in a business with so many players at various levels.

"We don't have canceled checks of their dues payments to the cartels. But we know that they were moving large quantities of drugs, which are probably brought in here under the supervision of the Gulf Cartel, because the Gulf Cartel is the dominant one here," he says.

"That money was supposed to be moving ... and it disappeared. So the attempt was to locate where was the money and who took it?" Curry says. "It was a contract hit, ordered to be carried out and paid for."

Since then, Curry has pushed aside concerns about resources and assigned one deputy to a DEA task force, another to work with the FBI. At the behest of the Department of Homeland Security, he joined in a conference call with police chiefs and sheriffs in border states to discuss what he now calls "a common problem."

And he answers, as candidly as possible, his citizens' questions when they ask him about this "new" threat.

"People want to have a comfort zone, and if they have to confront the realities of how rough life really is, that doesn't sit well," he says. "It scares them. And they don't want to be scared. South of our border: gunfights, violence — it is a normal, accepted, expected behavior. That has now moved into our borders."

___

Ask just about any DEA agent or expert who keeps a close watch on drug trafficking, and they'll cringe at the use of the word "war." They'll tell you, flat out, that no, it's not likely ever to be won. Just as there will always be robberies and rapes and homicides, there will always be narcotrafficking.

So they take their victories where they can. And there have been victories.

Heads of cartels have been toppled. Juan Garcia Abrego, former chief of the Gulf Cartel and once on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, is serving 11 life terms in a Colorado federal prison after his 1996 arrest in Mexico and extradition to the United States. His successor, Osiel Cardenas, awaits trial in Houston after his 2007 extradition from Mexico.

These handovers have become almost routine under Calderon, who reversed long-standing practice and allowed more Mexicans to be tried in the United States. Last year, he extradited a record 95 wanted criminals, including several high-ranking members of the Tijuana-based Arrellano-Felix cartel.

In February, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the arrest of more than 750 people as part of "Operation Xcellerator," which targeted Mexico's most powerful drug organization, the Sinaloa Cartel. Another 175 were arrested last fall as part of "Project Reckoning," an investigation into the Gulf Cartel.

President Barack Obama has promised to dispatch hundreds of additional agents to the border, along with more gear and drug-sniffing dogs. "If the steps that we've taken do not get the job done," he said, "then we will do more."

"More" may well come in the form of more direct aid to Mexico. In her first visit to Mexico as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton said the White House would seek $80 million to help Mexico buy Blackhawk helicopters. That's on top of a $1.3 billion Bush-era initiative providing drug-fighting aircraft and equipment to Mexico over the next three years.

But the answer to this problem is as complex as the problem itself. Enforcement, money and equipment alone aren't enough. In Mexico, the challenges run deep as corruption has infected almost every level of government. Here, the true remedy is just as daunting: Curbing the appetite that fuels all of this.

"We are still throwing the cops at a problem that is well beyond that," says George Friedman, who heads the global intelligence firm Stratfor. "It is a major geopolitical problem. We've been moving into a situation where the Mexican government is no longer the most powerful force in Mexico.

"It's a mess, not a war," says Friedman.

Many months after the Shelby County case, the Alabama sheriff still grapples with the ugly reality of what the mess means for him and his community.

He had his own victory, of sorts. Arrests were swift, and six suspects now are held without bond in the Shelby County Jail charged with capital murder. One owned a tire shop, another was a barber — more evidence to authorities of how bad guys can blend in.

Still, it is a victory without call for celebration, because Curry wonders when and where it will happen again.

"This is not an isolated incident. It is a standard business practice with this group of people, and it is simply going to be repeated," he says. "I can't predict whether it's going to be repeated here or not, but it's going to be repeated in communities throughout the United States whenever these disagreements occur."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090418/ap_on_re_us/drug_war_the_fight_at_home

[gamo2hammerli]

I saw on the news that the Mex prez is asking Obama or hinting at him to try to limit or close down "Those" tactical firearms makers in the States.....because the drug Mexican drug cartels are buying them up and smuggling them into Mexico.