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Pro- and anti-Second Amendment advocates are drawing clear lines of battle as the United Nations continues negotiations this week over the proposed Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), an agreement that is opposed by gun rights organizations including the National Rifle Association and the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, currently attending meetings on international gun rights in Europe, will be back just in time to turn around and head for New York. He was the cornerstone to creation of the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (IAPCAR) and has...

The invalid assumptions behind the United Nations’ small arms control initiatives By Jeff Moran New York, NY --(Ammoland.com)- Next month diplomats from the world over will converge at the United Nations in New York to formally negotiate a legally binding Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). This is the culmination of over a decade of humanitarian advocacy and pre-negotiations inside and outside the United Nations. It’s part of a larger global effort kick-started in 2001 with the passage of a non-legally binding resolution by the UN General Assembly. This resolution was called the “Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the...

Obama and Holder are enamored of it... Hillary Clinton commited us to it... all they need now is Dear Leader's signature/ratification by Harry Reid's Senate and the US populace has forever forfeited a significant chunk of it's 2nd Amendment rights. Specifically, what's all this mean? If passed by the UN and ratified by the U.S. Senate, the UN Small Arms Treaty will likely FORCE the U.S. to: Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding Americans cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL 'unauthorized' civilian firearms (yet firearms owned by the...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is edging toward decisions that would further shrink the U.S. nuclear arsenal, possibly to between 1,000 and 1,100 warheads, reflecting new thinking on the role of nuclear weapons in an age of terror, say current and former officials. The reductions that are under consideration align with President Barack Obama's vision of trimming the nation's nuclear arsenal without harming national security in the short term, and in the longer term, eliminating nuclear weapons. The White House has yet to announce any plan for reducing the number of nuclear weapons, beyond commitments made in the recently completed...

Introduction by Philip Watson The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is mired in controversy, rumor, and misinformation among both gun-rights activists and anti-gun crusaders. Jeff Moran of TSM WorldWide has been monitoring this situation along with several other groups including the Second Amendment Foundation and the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (IAPCAR). In “Dishonest Humanitarianism? The invalid assumptions behind the United Nations’ small arms control initiatives,” Moran cites numerous examples of propaganda used by the supporters of the anti-gun treaty. Moran details the specifics of the ATT, and invalidates the generalizations associated with global small...

The normally-reserved Yves Smith asks whether Obama should be impeached over it. Democratic Senator Wyden – the head of the committee which is supposed to oversee it – is so furious about the lack of access that he has introduced legislation to force disclosure. Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is so upset by it that he has leaked a document on his website to show what’s going on. What is everyone so furious about? An international treaty being negotiated in secret which would not only crack down on Internet privacy much more than SOPA or ACTA, but would...

As another hearing is scheduled for this Thursday at 10:00am on the Senate floor and we get closer to a June vote on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), I would like to call out attention on the remaining 20 Republican Senators that have not yet signed the letter to Sen. Reid which would block the passage of this bill. Yes I wrote about this few weeks ago in hopes that RedStaters would help prod their Senators into getting on board to stop this UN agenda. There has been some success since my last diary, probably due to your...

“Venezuela bans private gun ownership,” BBC News reported. “Under the new law, only the army, police and certain groups like security companies will be able to buy arms from the state-owned weapons manufacturer and importer.” It’s presented, of course, as an “attempt by the government to improve security and cut crime.” But opponents of Marxist strongman Hugo Chávez, at least the ones whose voices can be heard when he’s not shutting down opposition broadcasting stations for “media crimes,” question police “capacity or the will to enforce the new law.” That’s an understatement. Having seen Chávez temporarily ousted in a 2002...

(CNSNews.com) – The Senate Foreign Relations Committee began the latest round in a decades-long fight to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), known as the Law of the Sea Treaty, with supporters in the Obama administration and the military squaring off against Republican opponents on Wednesday. “I am well aware that this treaty does have determined opposition, limited, but nevertheless quite vociferous,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the committee. “And it’s unfortunate because it’s opposition based in ideology and mythology, not in facts, evidence, or the consequences of our continuing failure to accede to...

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced Wednesday he likely won't bring up the Law of the Sea Treaty for a vote before the November election. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said some lawmakers “on and off the committee” have candidly told him they'd “be more comfortable” if they could avoid having to cast the controversial vote during the campaign season. He made the announcement during a high-level hearing with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey. “I would like to see this

It's bad enough when American tax dollars are blown on government-created debacles such as Solyndra and "Operation Fast and Furious." But at least in those instances the expenditures carried a bare modicum of democratic legitimacy. What if, on the other hand, the U.S. Treasury was raided for billions of dollars, which were then redistributed to the rest of the world by an international bureaucracy headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica? That's what will surely happen if the U.S. Senate gives its advice and consent to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a deeply flawed treaty that was rejected...

Passing this on, please help spread it around.This is a release from First Coast Tea Party. It applies to all of us. IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT UPCOMING TREATIES - IF PASSED THEY CAN ONLY BE REPEALED WITH A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.. ACTION IS NEEDED Ya know that button with George Bush's picture asking "DO YOU MISS ME YET" on it? Well I own one of those buttons and I think it is time to put in on my jacket. In my last email I sent you all an attachment with 6 Treaties that are in the pipeline. Do your own research about...

Contributors: volunteer activists of the Sovereignty Campaign – @SovCam The U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs is once again diddling with the ultra-massive U.S. sovereignty and communitarian wealth giveaways known as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty (UNCLOS or LOST). Whenever one sees “communitarian,” one may think “global communist.” Neo-Marxist Saboteur Barack Obama‘s State and Defense Departments (including numerous compromised, NATO-head officers) are pressuring the Senate to adopt this travesty after years of resistance dating back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency. If the committee goes forward with it, they could choose either of two paths: 1....

While liberal journalists continue to claim that Agenda 21 is just a “conspiracy theory” being advanced by right-wing crackpots, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the International Council for Environmental Law (ICEL) have released their fourth Draft of the International Covenant on Environment and Development. This document was designed from the beginning to convert the “soft-law” non-binding Agenda 21 into firmly binding global law — enforceable through the International Criminal Court and/or the dispute resolution features of the Convention on the Law of the Sea. Two excellent analyses of this document are available here and here....

Sovereignty: Even if he's not re-elected, the president hopes to leave behind a treaty giving a U.N. body veto power over the use of our territorial waters and to which we'd be required to give half of our offshore oil revenue. The Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) has been lurking in the shadows for decades. Like the Kyoto Protocol that pretended to be an effort to save the earth from the poisoned fruit of the Industrial Revolution, LOST pretends to be an effort to protect the world's oceans from environmental damage and remove it as a cause of potential...

Egypt informed Israel Sunday afternoon that it is unilaterally cancelling the agreement of supply of gas to Israel. The announcement was made to EMG, the firm that receives the gas from Egypt, and reported on Channel 2 news. The peace treaty with Egypt includes a financial appendix, in which Egypt agrees to supply Israel with oil. Several years ago the appendix was changed so that the oil was replaced by gas. The treaty commits Egypt to supply Israel with the amount of gas it requires for a specified period, in exchange for payment.

New York, NY --(Ammoland.com)- Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) proponents have lied from the beginning. And they persist in attempts to reassure people in countries that allow civilian firearm ownership that the ATT will not affect their national laws. We are told the Treaty will basically affect the illegal transfer of weapons, but not lawful civilian ownership. BullS#!t! That’s the Big Lie. Proponents insist that they only wish to control “illicit” weapons. That limited goal was repeated many times, and is the reason why so many countries agreed to hold Treaty talks. We are told that the control of lawfully possessed...

According to Rebeccah Heinrichs, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget request reveals that “that the president has utterly failed to make good on his promises” on nuclear modernization and missile defense. During the ratification debate on the New Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (New START), President Obama promised to modernize the U.S. nuclear infrastructure, claiming that such investment is “essential to facilitating reductions while sustaining deterrence under New START and beyond.” However, the Administration failed to include in its budget the additional $4.1 billion that was promised for the nuclear weapons...

“It has come to our attention that Arms Trade Treaty proponents are attempting to change the rules mid-stream, prior to the upcoming Treaty negotiations in early July,” researchers Paul Gallant, Alan Chwick, and Joanne D. Eisen wrote in a breaking story published yesterday in AmmoLand Gun News. “Ted R. Bromund, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, alerted the public to the very real possibility that ATT proponents are changing the meaning of the term ‘consensus’ and to the political ramifications for the US if ATT proponents prevail,” they warn. “Until now, ‘consensus’ has been understood by the US and...

Negotiations for a new U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) are supposed to be finalized in July 2012. Some of its supporters argue it would have no “impact on the ability of individuals within the United States to acquire and possess firearms.”[1] Even if this is true, it is not the only reason to be concerned about the treaty. But if the treaty comes before the Senate, its domestic effects will be of central importance. While the treaty is not yet complete, analysis of the current draft demonstrates that there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about its potential domestic effects....