Dave Workman, Seattle Gun Rights Examiner

July 11, 2011 -   

The fight over international gun control is unfolding anew this week at the United Nations building in New York, as the stage is being set for next year’s “final negotiations” on a proposed treaty that critics say is a threat to the Second Amendment, and a Washington State-based group is right in the thick of it.

   Bellevue’s Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, is in the Big Apple this week, attending the third “preparatory committee meeting” for the proposed Arms Trade Treaty, which he says is an elaborate way of saying “international gun control.” He told this column via telephone that international gun control advocates are “in abundance.”

   Gottlieb, who serves as SAF’s executive vice president, and Julianne Versnel are at the UN because SAF is a member of the Executive Committee of the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities, a recognized non-governmental organization (NGO). This status allows SAF to closely monitor the internal UN debate over firearms issues, and the organization uses that insight to its advantage.

These meetings lay the ground work for the final negotiation sessions of the ATT in 2012. SAF’s position is firm – an ATT which in any way affects the constitutional rights of American gun owners is totally unacceptable. Civilian firearms and ammunition must not be within the scope of the United Nation’s Arms Trade Treaty. There is no compromise on this crucial point.—Alan Gottlieb, Second Amendment Foundation

   Gun rights advocates like Gottlieb have been insisting for years that there is a genuine threat to Second Amendment rights at the UN, and this proposed treaty – up for final adoption next year (coincidental, perhaps, to the November 2012 election for United States president) – is no laughing matter in the firearms community.

   SAF has been active in the Programme of Action to Prevent and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, and Versnel used the opportunity last year to speak about the importance of firearms ownership to women, as a defense against state-sanctioned brutality against women. Like it or not, rape has been used as a weapon in various conflicts.

    A founding member of the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (IAPCAR), SAF has been represented both in New York and in Vienna, Austria during international firearms discussions. IAPCAR is something of a fledgling organization that now includes scores of national and international organizations representing tens of millions of gun owners around the world, according to a SAF alert that was sent to its members earlier today.

   Perhaps by no small coincidence, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is also represented at the UN this week, where Operation Fast and Furious might just be lurking in the shadows. ATF is wearing egg on its face over that gun sting fiasco, but now in the wake of revealing testimony by acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson on July 4, some other federal agencies have also been implicated for their alleged involvement, as this column reported.

   According to Gottlieb, this could be a very interesting week in sweltering New York City.

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