Posted on 05/10/2006 2:31:06 AM PDT by ovrtaxt
FAIRFAX, Va. -- Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, tells NewsMax that the United Nations is dead set on writing a treaty that will curb domestic ownership of guns.
He also says his worst fear is that a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency would allow such a treaty to severely damage Second Amendment rights.
"She has never cast a pro-gun vote in the U.S. Senate," advises LaPierre, author of "The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the U.N. Plan to Destroy the Bill of Rights."
"She will probably be the most anti-firearm Second Amendment candidate to ever run for President of the United States."
All this is not some vague future scenario, warns LaPierre. The world's governments will be attending the second world gun summit in New York City between June 27 and July 7, and the anti-gun factions are raring to go.
The ‘Nightmare Scenario'
LaPierre says that while a formal treaty needs two-thirds of the Senate to get approved, the damage to gun ownership rights can be done with a simple agreement, which requires only a simple majority in the House and the Senate.
"That is how President Clinton passed NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. The U.N. can do it with a simple agreement - if someone like Hillary Clinton ever becomes president.
"Here is the nightmare scenario on that: Yes, our Supreme Court has said the U.S. Constitution trumps treaties. But say Hillary Clinton becomes President in 2008 and gets a couple of Supreme Court appointments. The policy of her husband when he was president is that the Second Amendment applies only to the government and not individuals. Individuals have no right to own guns - only the government.
"If the U.S. Supreme Court, stacked with Hillary Clinton appointments, were to decide that the Second Amendment is only a government right and not the individual right, there would be nothing in the Constitution then to prohibit this U.N. treaty from taking effect," LaPierre said.
Making matters worse, adds LaPierre, is that in his opinion, Supreme Court Justices are increasingly looking to international custom and international law – a phenomenon the U.N. is counting on.
The chief NRA spokesman also warns that in yet another wave of attacks, the U.N. will be preparing international lawsuits against American firearms manufacturers.
The George Soros ‘Toxin'
For anyone who doubts that the U.N. could weasel its designs into the political and judicial fabric of the country, LaPierre gives a short course in reality.
He explains to NewsMax that the whole anti-gun movement in the U.S. is linked to the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) umbrella at the U.N.
IANSA's director, Rebecca Peters, who once famously debated LaPierre in London, is a great advocate of what she says is the "need to address the problem of guns circulating among civilian populations."
Another way anti-gun activists "have tentacles into the grass roots of this country" is through 527 committees, instructs LaPierre.
"One of the major funding people at the U.N. in terms of the gun ban movement and the NGOs [Non-governmental Organizations] is [billionaire activist] George Soros, who is putting tens of millions of dollars into 527 committees within the U.S. designed to manipulate our elections.
"George Soros is like a new toxin that is polluting American politics. These people consider themselves earthlings first and citizens of any other country second. They eat breakfast in London and dinner in New York and fly around the world in their jets.
"It is increasingly infecting American politics like a germ, and we are going to have to deal with it - including the national and international media."
‘Dead Serious'
La Pierre goes on to explain how IANSA is further funded by the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Norway, and by what he describes as many left-wing foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Samuel Rubin Foundation.
The Rubin Foundation is headquartered right at the United Nations Plaza in New York City and touts that its mission is to "search for an equitable reallocation of the world's resources."
"As I talk about in the book, Samuel Rubin was a member of the Communist Party. His daughter, Cora Rice, is now running that Foundation. There is a lot of money behind this effort and they are dead serious about writing a treaty that gives guns to the governments and takes the right to own a firearm away from any citizen anywhere in the world, including the United States."
When asked to comment on the sentiment of the severest critics of the U.N. – that it is time for the U.S. to simply abandon the organization – LaPierre says he thinks everything ought to be on the table.
LaPierre would like to see a serious overhaul that includes cutting U.S. funding in a very serious way and turning to other international organizations.
As to that funding issue, U.S. taxpayers last year put $3.8 billion in United Nations programs - $1.5 billion in directly assigned money and $2.3 billion in voluntary money.
Unfortunately, says LaPierre, "a lot of that has gone for all kinds of scandals and a lot of it is being misused on this U.N. gun ban effort. The U.N. is even trying to grab control of the Internet and take it away from the United States, and we need to step back and look at this whole thing from a prospective of whether the U.N. is doing anything these days to serve the interest of the United States of America or not."
‘Freedom Grabbing Politicians Like Mayor Bloomberg'
In his free-ranging conversation with NewsMax, LaPierre reserved special vitriol for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently hosted a conference of fellow mayors from around the country.
LaPierre points out that Bloomberg, in his opinion, wants to impose a New York City-style gun law on the citizens of Texas and Kansas and Wyoming and North Carolina - throughout the whole United States.
In LaPierre's view, the Big Apple is denying ordinary citizens the right to own a firearm and the right to self-defense.
"It's a misguided, wrong-headed, freedom-grabbing approach that our founding fathers wanted nothing of. It goes right back to the policies of King George and it is elitist.
"If you are rich, you can have your bodyguard," laments LaPierre. "If you are rich, you can live behind a security system. If you are rich, you get your carry permit and you get your gun because you are special. But the less special people, all the rest of us, are flat out of luck."
LaPierre says Bloomberg doesn't want to impose gun bans on the "special people," who get gun permits.
But LaPierre evokes the what goes around, comes around attitude: "In election after election, citizens have shown that they will go to the polls and defeat freedom-grabbing politicians like Mayor Bloomberg in New York."
To the NRA spokesman's mind, any crime problem in New York City is best attributed to "the fact that it is not prosecuting criminals.
"The American public saw straight through Rosie O'Donnell, who wanted to be protected by bodyguards with guns and yet wanted to take guns away from the American people. People can see straight through this hypocrisy coming out of the Bloomberg administration and they choke on it."
In LaPierre's opinion the only thing that works is directly confronting criminals and taking them off of the street.
‘You Need To Prosecute Them'
LaPierre rattles through the laws that need to be enforced to the letter:
"If violent gangs touch guns, you need to prosecute them," he argues. "You need not let them out on bail. You need to have a prosecutor and you need not plea bargain and you need to put these people in prison - and leave the rights of law-biding citizens alone."
LaPierre also had strong words about a recent court decision in New York.
A federal judge just ruled that New York City can have access to gun-tracing information gathered by the federal government's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), saying such information is critical in a lawsuit brought by New York City against gun manufacturers.
In 2004, NRA's clout helped push Congress to pass an amendment that forbids the release to the public of federal data on gun tracing.
LaPierre opines that what the New York judge failed to consider was that the amendment passed Congress with the strong support of the Department of Justice and law enforcement.
"The Department of Justice of the United States and law enforcement said publicly before Congress that they believed that the trace data was being misused by the anti-gun movement in the United States and their lawyers and their political network," says LaPierre.
He added that it was shown the misuse was compromising criminal investigations.
"I do not agree with this lone judge who is trying to subvert the will of the United States Congress," he concludes.
Countries Around the World Under U.N. Pressure
Australian Prime Minister John Howard, on the recent 10th anniversary of an infamous shooting spree by a lone gunman that killed 35 people, appealed for a further tightening of gun control laws, with The Coalition for Gun Control, an antigun lobby, urging a national ban on semiautomatic pistols. These weapons are available for sport shooting.
"The average Australian does not need a gun," Howard told a TV audience.
LaPierre says that Down Under was getting pressure - like every country in the world - from the United Nations to ban their civilians from owning guns.
And it is a tactic that is simply not working, he says, clicking off some more facts and figures.
He notes that after the Australians got tough with guns, the ensuing four years saw some telling developments:
And don't forget the crime wave in the United Kingdom that followed on the heels of the gun ban there, he advises: "They had close to 6 million burglaries; 314 burglaries a day are going on in London right now. Gun crime has increased by over 50 percent since the ban passed in the United Kingdom."
Murder in the Sudan with Government Guns
But to LaPierre's thinking, the gun ban policy in the Sudan may be the worst example.
The genocide going on in the Sudan, he notes, is being perpetrated by Arab criminal gangs that are being "armed by the Government of Sudan to kill the dark-skinned Arab-Africans in Darfur.
"The government guns that the U.N. approves of are doing the killing over there," he concludes with disgust.
LaPierre laments that the pattern has been seen before – in Bosnia and Rwanda – with death coming in waves to the innocent because of a U.N. policy of disarming all civilians and leaving them to the whim of "thugs."
He argues that such places are being run by dictators, tyrants who are committing genocide and unleashing thugs who perpetrate rape and torture and terror against their own people.
"If you disarm the civilians from having firearms throughout the world, there is no way to fight back against these genocidal governments that are run by thugs and dictators," he concludes.
The Culture of Corruption
Both in his NewsMax interview and in his new book, LaPierre drives home to Americans the corruption that he says is going on at the United Nations – which is too little noted by the traditional media.
Above and beyond the notorious oil-for-food scandal, he points to other events he sees as travesties.
One case in point: the peacekeepers the U.N sent to Cambodia, who received an attractive wage and one U.N.-provided condom per day.
"Bulgaria and Romania emptied their prisons and psychiatric wards to get the peacekeepers that they sent to Cambodia, and then naturally they raped, they robbed and they stole money and did what criminals do," he recounts.
He maintains that all these scandals have been documented and yet have been swept under the carpet by both the United Nations and the national media.
LaPierre gives over a whole chapter of his book to the U.N.'s desire to take charge of the Internet away from the U.S.
He notes with disbelief that the U.N. just held a conference on the Internet that was chaired by a delegate from China.
"China has just shut down 47,000 Internet cafés," he recalls. "They just hired 4,000 more Internet security police to jail anyone in China that writes anything critical of the government on the Internet, and yet their delegate is chairing the U.N. conference on the Internet, and they held it in Tunisia, a country that is jailing journalists for free speech.
"If the U.N. gets control of the Internet, we are going to have an iron curtain around the world descend on free speech," he concludes.
‘Got To Feel and Taste It'
LaPierre says that a good part of the reason he penned his latest book is that Senators on Capitol Hill don't realize how bad the U.N. has become.
"You have to get up there [to New York City] to see and feel and taste it, and then you realize it is actually scary. Most people in the U.S. have no idea how extensive the structure of the UN is. It has three headquarters, not one. It has a huge facility in Vienna; a huge facility in Geneva."
But most of all, he decries what he sees as the institution's contempt for the freedoms that we have as citizens of the United States. These are not people who respect the Bill of Rights, he says, and these are not countries that have a Bill of Rights.
"They would like to reduce the United States of America's freedom to some lower United Nations standard that doesn't include many of the freedoms that are central to the United States.
"It is time to step back, all Americans, and take a good look at the U.N. and re-evaluate what we are doing."
"I will pack up my family and leave the USA for the duration of her term."
Where would you like you luggage sent to this time Mr. Baldwin? (just kidding)
Wayne must believe that McCain will get the Republican nomination.
That single issue is Freedom. The Freedom against tyrants who would rule your world because they believe they are better than you.
Yep...agreed. My next door neighbor hates guns & people that own them....she would be the first one at my door should she be threatened by a criminal....
Who was that black columnist in DC who was so anti-gun...and got arrested for having one?
And then you say....
One day, we're going to call their bluff.
Wow! The evil Republicans are merely keeping the Dems around to threaten VOTERS to stay on the Republican reservation, "or else."
AND....at the same time....YOU and other "fed ups" are threatening to let the Dems take over "to call the GOP's bluff."
So in your world, in 2008 the GOP and the "fed ups" will sing "I told you so" in unison while the Dems win out?
Let's not try to build on Supreme court appointees. Lets not build on rejecting Kyoto. Lets not build ABM technology. Let's not finish Iraq.
Instead of giving us a Democrat to teach us a lesson, why not offer us a real Conservative candidate in the primary instead? Got one?
The beast WILL be the rats nominee and the voter fraud to elect her will be beyond belief. The marxists will stop at nothing knowing they are so close to their goals of total control of every federal govenment function.
Don't forget about getting two outstanding SCOTUS judges confirmed. This is the #1 thing the President can do for his conservative base, and he did it this term.
Right now I'm leaning toward Belize.
Nice climate, beautiful beaches, not a lot of people, and English is the official language.
Two judges? Big deal! If there are not 9 true conservatives on the Supreme Court by 2008 then I'm voting for Hillary.
/sarc
Was that Rowan? Carl Rowan, or something?
The guy was psychotic lib and his columns were deranged.
Bump.
L
Then you are a complete idiot.
Belize's kleptocracy stands out in all the CA banana repubs! And the solution for them is to dive headlong into socialism to solve the problems of the little folk. You sound like a caye tourist that never ventured inland.
Baldwin redux.
That's it...perfect example.
What crawled up your butt this morning?
I didn't say I wanted to live in Belize forever. I just said it would be a nice place to spend the 4 years of the Hildebeast's reign of terror.
And you can blow the Baldwin blast out of your arse.
I do not believe hillary will be president. The one senerio is a Ross perot situation but thats it. I know alot of people who did not vote for GWB but will not vote for Hillery. If hillery gets the nomination then that proves that the dems still have not learned the lesson from 2004. she is a flip flopper like kerry and she brings alot of baggage. However, whoever is the repub nominee better act like she is 50 points ahead. I wanted to see GWB do to Kerry what his father did to dukakis, he never did
Sorry, boss, but the "true conservative" purists got my goat this morning.
Not that you're one of them, but the "if the Republicans don't /insert single issue here/ then I hope Hillary wins to teach the GOP a lesson" mantra is not too far from "if Hillary wins, then screw this country and the fools in it because I'm moving to Belize."
More importantly, Belize's PUP is a bunch of socialist liars worse than anything Arlen Specter or McCain or any of the other "RINO's" or EVEN HILLARY could ever come up with.
In fact, I wish all the "true conservatives" and you, also, WOULD go try to live in Belize for a while and you'd all wish to God you could contribute to a DeWine or other "RINO sellout."
Again, I'm not saying you're one of the "true conservative" whiners, but forcryingoutloud, running off to Belize, or France, or anywhere is the last thing we need out of you.
Mike Pence- possibly.
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