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U.N. efforts
At Opinio Juris, Kenneth Anderson has a response to a NY Times hit piece on NRA and the UN.
"The movement toward a small arms and light weapons treaty got going in the wake of the landmines ban treaty; it was a natural follow-on for the then-ascendent global civil society movement. But I recall sitting in meetings of landmines advocates talking about where things should go next; I was director of the Human Rights Watch Arms Division, with a mandate to address the transfer of weapons into conflicts where they would be used in the violation of the laws of war, and small arms were the main concern. I was astonished at how quickly the entire question morphed from concern about the flood of weapons into African civil wars how to use international law to do an end run around supposedly permissive gun ownership regimes in the US. ....
I dropped any personal support for the movement when it became clear, a long time ago, that it is about controlling domestic weapons equally in the US (or, today, even more so) as in Somalia or Congo. Yes, there is a logic, a coherency, to the idea that one needs a set of universal rules that are more or less the same for every place. One can choose between that idea and the one that I urged, that it was both substantively wrong and disastrous strategy to think that the rules for a profoundly broken place, lands of civil wars and failed states, should or could be the same as for a functioning democratic society. The small arms and light weapons movement long ago made its choice about that, and I dropped it at that time."
Hat tip to Joe Olson....
· UN
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i have a few 30-page volumes they might want to read.
You can't take over an armed country. I forget who said that, but I am sure one of the founders made that point.
In the rest of the world, the unarmed are slaughtered wholesale, why doesn't the UN address that problem? There are a few places where that seems to be going on daily. No I am not talking about places like WDC, Chicago and Philadelphia -- I mean countries.
The UN doesn't address that problem because few of the delegates to the UN are appointed by democratically elected officials. Remember, genocide is something that your average dictator wants to have as an available option if he needs it.
I actually agree with him on this:
I think that US gun ownership supporters are entirely too romantic about what widespread automatic weapons mean in societies where there is either no tradition that teaches about these kinds of weapons, or else in the course of war and disruption, such traditions have eroded.
I've heard more than a few gun nuts suggest that "Well, if we just dropped some rifles in there, it would sort itself all out." It's not quite that simple. I do think that there are situations where that is the case; I would support arming villages in Sudan to fight against government back militias who terrorize them. But there are conflicts in the world where you just have one group of people brutalizing another group of people, and adding more arms into the situation really isn't going to accomplish much.
In societies which are completely broken, the strong brutalize the weak, and brutalize each other. Putting a rifle in a man's hands does nothing if he doesn't have the skill or motivation to stand up for his own life and liberty. We have a tradition of liberty and individual rights in this country which makes having an armed society work. If your cultural tradition is subservience to the strong, then having a gun accomplishes nothing for you.
Somalia is probably the best known current example of what Sebastian references. No real government of any kind has functioned in that country for going on a couple of decades. The only authority that exists over a given territory is that which a warlord and his militia can exert. They control the largest area they can, and everybody has to pay a tax (of sorts) to the warlord and/or his men (many of whom are little more than boys) to do much of anything. Get lippy with them, or refuse to pay the toll, at a roadblock or check point and they will drag you out of your truck and kill you right there. The next poor slob in line will keep his yap shut and pay the toll.
You know what I mean?
The people just do what they have to do to survive from day to day.
It seems to me that in most cases legal arms would help the defenders more than the attackers, even in these sort of situations--The attackers are likely to already have arms of some sort, or defer their attack until they do. When someone is bent on murdering you, your family or your village, you are likely to discover motivation even with lack of skill, and you aren't any worse off than without the gun. Even if the defenders usually lose, they are likely to cause enough casualties to deter all but the most determined attackers.
> But there are conflicts in the world where you just have one group of people brutalizing another group of people, and adding more arms into the situation really isn't going to accomplish much.
There are four cases.
(1) Armed folks brutalizing unarmed.
(2) Armed folks brutalizing armed.
(3) Unarmed brutalizing unarmed.
(4) Unarmed brutalizing armed.
(4) is unstable (and unlikely). (2) and (4) are dangerous for the brutalizers - they're also the result of adding guns. (1) and (3) are solved by adding guns.
I tend to think that having everybody armed is most likely to have a good outcome in the long run, but there is another situation that complicates the analysis:
(5) Well armed brutalizing poorly armed.
To start arguments at parties when I get bored, I've said before that prior to deporting illegal immigrants to Mexico, the US should give them a week's worth of classes on the US Constitution, how individual rights are different from human rights, and how Mexico is failing it's citizenry. Then give them guns, send them home and tell them to solve their own problems.
Given that Mexico is dangerously close to becoming the next failed state and run by narco-traficantes and drug cartels instead of the federal government, does arming the general populace really help?
In some ways, Yes. They can defend themselves better against violence. In some ways, No if all they will do is sell their guns for food, attack and shoot without a plan for a better government, or attack U.S. border towns.
It's a tough question to answer.
Fiemos Mexico!
The Elephant in the African Arms-Room is Chinese and one the UN will never and CAN never attack.
Mad-Hatter and Murderer Mugabe is the proud owner of a palatial $9-million Palace in Harare (and a similarly lavish country hideaway), fitted with the latest electronic security systems AND including anti-aircraft missiles....provided for him by the People’s Republic of China.
He got this in return for a 2005 deal in which Mugabe HANDED-OVER to China his country’s mineral rights -- including the world’s second largest reserves of platinum worth $500 billion... That's enough dough to buy as many AK's as he needs to suppress his starving slave population indefinitely.
And it has nothing to do with US arms which is at best a fig leaf of a smoke-screen of a fantasy for some UN NGO's and anti-USA busybodies.
Better to armed when facing brutes than disarmed. Doesn't matter if in Dallas Tx or Sudan.
The whole age of enlightenment and the "Rights of Man" grew out of accessible firearms. There was no culture of individual rights or liberty prior to that time. At least not for the common man. The nobles had a semblance of rights and liberty, some of which ended up codified in the Magna Carta.
Gunpowder weapons, which were easily manufactured and easy to learn to use proficiently broke the back of feudalism. Thus, the historical record shows that by flooding weapons into the 'broken' culture it will end up fixing itself. Otherwise the brutalizers will end up in charge with no countervailing force to keep them in check.
When I look at societies like those on the African Continent I see the dismal failure that is gun control. Please note that there has not been a general accessibility to weapons in Africa in centuries. THe weapons that have allegedly flooded into Africa tend to go to the various factions and not the general populace. It's like selling weapons to the bloods and the crips in LA, but not allowing the general citizen to purchase equivalent weaponry.
Yep. They won't limit their activities to automatic weapons, artillery, and explosive. Speaks volumes, don't it?