5. The demand to include ammunition. A lot of countries want the PoA to include ammunition. Right now, it doesn’t, and there’s a good reason for this: guns are durable, relatively easy to mark and trace, and don’t work without ammunition, whereas ammunition is consumable and is produced in enormous quantities that are impossibly burdensome to trace. The number of delegations here that can’t grasp this simple point is incredible. For the sake of the political thrill of including ammunition, they want to add an unworkable commitment to the PoA when most of the nations in the room aren’t fulfilling the much simpler ones they’ve failed to uphold for the past 17 years.
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10. Promoting gun control. Well, you knew it would come to this. In theory, the PoA is tightly limited to the international illicit trade. But the people who back it make no secret of their support for gun control. On Thursday, 17 nations, including Mexico, proposed including civilian possession in the PoA. Last Friday, we had a visit from Wear Orange, of Everytown for Gun Safety, financed by Michael Bloomberg. They clearly see the PoA as relevant to domestic gun control. The best illustration of why came on Wednesday, when in a side event on domestic gun control laws an Australian representative stated that “every gun shop that disappeared was a point from which guns could no longer be diverted.” In other words, according to the gun controllers, the way to control the illicit arms trade is to make sure there are no legal places to buy guns, which will ensure that no legal guns exist to become illegal. The Australian representative went on to point out that the most important source of crime guns in Australia is thefts from legal gun owners. That sums up their point of view nicely: legal gun owners should be deprived of their right to buy a gun so that, when a thief invades their house, they will not have a gun that can be stolen. Also, they will be defenseless. The problem, by this way of thinking, is not the thief: it is the law-abiding gun owner, who should be punished accordingly.