Posted on 06/13/2009 7:52:00 PM PDT by Disambiguator
“The spread of small arms creates a serious global problem and requires an equally urgent response because the lives and futures of children are at stake. These weapons have extinguished more young lives than they have protected.” – Carol Bellamy, Executive Director, UNICEF
The vast majority of Americans, regardless of their opinions on the increasing scope of international law, agree with the proposition that children should not be used as soldiers. Accordingly, much of the UN literature that addresses children and guns deals with this military-related issue.
However, a second theme is quickly found in virtually all UN pronouncements about child soldiers and weapons. UN child’s rights advocates believe, teach, and promote the idea that all private gun-ownership is dangerous for children, and that children have the right to grow up in a community that is free from all guns.
As the campaign to seek ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child intensifies, it is important for all Americans to understand the application of this children’s rights treaty to the issue of private gun ownership by American citizens.
Limiting the rights of gun-ownership is not some secret agenda of the UN, but is open for all to see. UNICEF, the official UN agency charged with the worldwide advancement of children’s rights, has published a four-color brochure entitled: “No Guns Please, We Are Children.” The quotation given at the opening of this paper is taken from the front cover of this UNICEF brochure.
Inside this brochure we find the following assertions about guns and children:
Two crucial conclusions can be drawn from these assertions:
First, the UN intends to address far more than children in war; the object is to eliminate the “threat” posed by guns from the lives of all children whether their community is characterized as “in conflict,” “post-conflict,” “destabilized,” or “enjoying relative peace.” Guns are a threat “on the streets of cities worldwide.”
Second, the UN contends that the threat posed by guns violates the “human rights” of children.
There can be no doubt that the UN believes that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is applicable to this issue. In this same pamphlet it declares: “The Convention on the Rights of the Child sets out comprehensive principles and standards to guide all actions and attitudes towards children.”
Thus, a nation that willingly accepts this treaty has made a legally binding agreement of international law to regulate its public policy towards all issues in a manner that is consistent with the UN vision on children’s human rights. If this statement were made in some other context, there might be some room for argument that the UN doesn’t really mean to include gun ownership within the sweep of comprehensive “standards to guide all actions and attitudes towards children.” But this statement was made in an official brochure entitled “No Guns Please, We are Children.”
This official UN brochure then clarifies the kind of public policy required towards firearms based upon these human rights of children:
The UN believes that the idea that small arms are “essential instruments for survival and protection” is destructive. Remember that the UN CRC purports to govern all actions and attitudes. The very belief that guns are necessary for protection is a destructive attitude that violates the “respect for human rights” required by the UN CRC.
There can be no doubt of the meaning of the statement: “Regulations are needed to ensure that small arms and light weapons are not easy to acquire and are never accessible to children.”
The UN official pamphlet makes it plain that nations need to “[i]mplement laws to protect children . . .from having access to small arms.” Moreover, the UN says that states should “[c]ollect and destroy small arms … through community programmes in which civil society plays a key role.”
The UN actively promotes the idea that small arms conflict with the human rights of children protected by the CRC. Yet another UN publication states:
Thus, it is clear that UNICEF believes that in order to comply with the principles of children’s rights contained in the UN CRC, America would need to adopt regulations to make it difficult for adults to acquire small arms and light weapons. Moreover, we would need to adopt regulations that prohibit weapons from ever being accessible to children.
In another UN official publication, “Guide to the Implementation of the World Programme of Action for Youth,” the following laws are advocated as necessary for the protection of children’s rights:
Call for restrictions on the number of guns that can be purchased in a one-month or one-year period.
It is essential to understand the interplay between treaties and state laws. Article VI of the United States Constitution provides:
In Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920), the state of Missouri challenged the constitutionality of federal interference with the state hunting laws concerning migratory birds. Federal game officials had intervened in Missouri based upon a treaty with Canada. The United States Supreme Court ruled that the treaty, and not Missouri’s state laws on hunting, was supreme. State law—including state hunting laws—must give way to treaties.
Thus, even if current state laws permit children to obtain hunting licenses and possess and discharge firearms for these purposes, such laws would have to give way to a treaty that contends that firearms should “never be accessible to children.”
The UN agenda for children does not stop with the direct disarming of individuals. Article 29 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child imposes educational standards on nations that become parties to the treaty. This includes “peace education,” which in other UN contexts means disarmament education. The UN World Congress on Disarmament Education adopted the following statements:
2. For the purposes of disarmament education, disarmament may be understood as any form of action aimed at limiting, controlling or reducing arms, including unilateral disarmament initiatives, and, ultimately, general and complete disarmament under effective international control. It may also be understood as a process aimed at transforming the current system of armed nation States into a new world order of planned unarmed peace in which war is no longer an instrument of national policy and peoples determine their own future and live in security based on justice and solidarity.
Links with human rights and development
7. As an integral part of peace education, disarmament education has essential links with human rights education and development education, in so far as each of the three terms peace, human rights and development must be defined in relation to the other two. Moreover, disarmament education offers an occasion to elucidate emerging concepts such as the individual and collective rights to peace and to development, based on the satisfaction of material and non-material human needs.
If the United States Senate ratifies the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child we will have become willing parties in a regime that obligates us to disarm our citizens, keep guns from children, and indoctrinate American children to believe in the utopia of world disarmament. This will cause our nation to surrender our own defenses and rest in the “security” of a world based on “individual and collective rights.”
What jumped out at me was a backhanded disparaging of the American gun culture, even though it wasn't mentioned by name, and the old "blame the gun" agitprop method. No mention was made of who was actually perpetrating these atrocities, but based on some other information some of the locations of concern are revealed. Common themes there are (not surprisingly) Africa, the Balkans, and Islam.
Links:
No Guns, Please, We Are Children
Guide to the Implementation of the World Programme of Action for Youth
Small Arms and Children - UNICEF Fact Sheet
UN CRC - General Comment No. 1 - The Aims of Education - Article 29 (1) (2001)
Disarmament & Nonproliferation Photo Workshop 1: Introduction to small arms disarmament
More links here.
NWO = 1 size fits all
Does the UN “peacekeeper” in the photo have his finger on the trigger?
See, I've said this all along. We need to legalize HEAVY weaponry for private ownership.... RPGS, Machineguns, HAWK Missle systems, mortars, are a lot harder for children to figure out. If I had the ability to own these things, I'd need less hand guns. This would result in lowering the likeliness of children being injured by light weapons as I would own fewer light weapons.
That soldier needs to go back to basic gun-safety training.
RULE 2 VIOLATION - FINGER ON THE TRIGGER
Does this mean our military have to choose between having guns and having children?
RULE 2 VIOLATION - FINGER ON THE TRIGGER
That was my thought.
Let's hope his weapon isn't loaded—he could hurt someone.
And so today Snow Geese and other "light geese" destroy the Artic Tundra-which will ultimately lead to a catastrophic population crash and imbalance of uncounted species that depend on various (natural) checks and balances to survive.
Another fine mess Goobermint Intervention created out of whole cloth.
Best regards,
That someone could be a child - a child that the soldier is supposed to be protecting from SALW (Small Arms & Light Weapons).
Does this mean we can get rid of our current administration?
Looks like a magazine is locked in. What kind of bull pup is that?
Message to UN. I do not care what you have to say about anything. If it were up to me, I would throw your asses out of America in the morning.
The UN is un-American, and should be thrown out of the US.
I love this cliche:
Get the US out of the UN, and the UN out of the US....
Yup.
children have the right to grow up in a community that is free from all guns.
Does this mean we can get rid of our current administration?
LOL
Why should we trust the UN to protect children when their “peacekeepers” have found guilty of raping women and children in exchange for the food they were supposed to be giving away?
I believe it is an L85
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