cb1000rider wrote:Someone fill a dummie in:
How do export controls on everything from small arms to helicopters impact our 2nd amendment rights? Or is it a "just one more step" thing?
Jaguar wrote:Here is why I believe Obama, via his designated representative John Kerry, signed the UN Gun Treaty.
The signing does not make it law. What it means is Obama believes the treaty is a good idea and commits the administration to seeking ratification. The next step is to send the treaty to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations with a package of documents to go along with the treaty, including policy benefits and potential risks to the US, significant regulatory impact, analysis of the issues surrounding the treaty's implementation, whether it needs domestic implementing legislation or regulations to abide by the treaty, along with Reservations, Understandings, and/or Declarations (RUDS).
At this point the Senate Foreign Relations Committee can begin its consideration. It can vote to send the treaty to the full Senate for action. It can also decide to ignore the treaty entirely. However, if the Committee fails to act on the treaty, it is not returned to the President. Treaties, unlike other legislative measures, remain available to the Senate from one Congress to the next, until they are actively disposed of or withdrawn by the President.
I believe Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to have the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sit on the treaty until such a time as either the makeup of the Senate changes or, heaven forbid, there is another Sandy Hook type shooting and passions run high. It would be at that point, and maybe even with some trickery by calling in session without opponents present, that they would pass the treaty from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (chaired by Robert Menendez, D-NJ) to the Senate and by hook or by crook pass this monstrosity and send it back to Obama for implementation.
I believe they know that with the current makeup of the Senate there is no chance to pass this, but this doesn’t mean they cannot sit on the treaty and hope for something to change. Remember, Obama believes this to be a “good idea”, or else it would not have been signed, so all they require to pass it is the opportunity.
Look at the map of the Senate, should a super Katrina like event slam into Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, 13 Republicans could go home to help their constituents leaving the Senate with 53 Democrats, 32 Republicans, and 2 Independents making a vote 55-32, or 63%, not quite there, but sprinkle in a few RINOs in and poof, a ratified UN Treaty on Small Arms becomes law of the United States.
The price of freedom is eternal diligence – and unless we can get this voted on and solidly rejected it could sit there until the time is right, and when the time is right I would expect the Marxist Party to pounce on it. Look at the proposed laws that come up after Sandy Hook and before the bodies were even laid to rest, don’t believe it is beneath them.
Jaguar explained why, partly, as well as I could. Here is some more:
http://www.rferl.org/content/un-arms-tr ... 17736.html
It requires countries to establish regulations for selling conventional weapons.
{snip}
What types of conventional weapons deals does the Arms Trade Treaty seek to regulate?
Conventional weapons covered by the UN Arms Trade Treaty include tanks and other armored combat vehicles, artillery, attack helicopters, naval warships, missiles and missile launchers, and small arms.
It also establishes common international standards for the regulation of the international trade in ammunition, weapons parts, and arms components.
The greatest danger of the treaty is that its definitions are overly broad and inclusive, rather than narrow and restrictive. So ultimately, if it passes, any administration or Congress could use it as a backdrop reason for more extensive domestic gun-control laws than we already have.
Furthermore, the U.S.
already has in place the kind of
export regulations called for by the treaty. We are
already acting within its limits with regard to the export of arms. Why do we need to bind ourselves to a piece of paper if we are (allegedly) already doing the right thing? The treaty is one more step in delegitimizing the possession of firearms in terms of the world's perceptions of them.
Examples? Here:
Fast & Furious.
Already illegal under U.S. law. If the treaty is ratified, it is illegal under international law, and the U.S. must take
internal measures to make sure that cartel members cannot do straw purchases and smuggle guns into Mexico. How? By removing "assault" weapons (an increasingly expanding category as California has just demonstrated by including shotguns as "assault weapons" in its new law) from the shelves of gun dealers.
And I used the term "allegedly" 2 paragraphs above because there have been times when the U.S. violated its own self-imposed pre-treaty export standards when it was geopolitically expedient to do so. That was because it was deemed by the powers that be
at the time (a consequence of elected governments) that it was in our nation's interests to do so. Obama is the ultimate globalist, dedicated to hamstringing our own country in geopolitical terms. By signing this treaty and leaving it on the Senate's doorstep until such a day that the Senate might ratify it (reread Jaguar's post above), Obama commits the U.S. to a treaty that it may have to violate in the future in the pursuit of our own national interests,
if it intends to pursue our own national interests. In other words, he puts the interests of other nations ahead of our own.
Pre-treaty, we were ALREADY following the treaty limitations in most affairs. Whenever we had to violate our own self-imposed standards in the name of our national interests,
we were not in violation of international law. By committing us to this treaty, acting on any such future needs would place the U.S. in violation of international law.
I could go on, but at exactly what point does Obama stop thinking of himself as President of the World, and
start thinking of himself as President of
the United States?
