A Bad Penny Comes Back

The Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms had a press release in my "in" basket today, which I will repeat in full below:

BELLEVUE, WA – The appointment of anti-gun rights former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels as an alternate representative to the United Nations has removed any doubt about the Obama administration’s intentions regarding global gun control initiatives, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

Nickels, a founding member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the author of Seattle’s failed attempt to override Washington’s state firearms preemption statute, was sworn in Wednesday to “help represent the United States in the UN assembly,” according to the Seattle Times.

“Putting an extremist gun banner in any position to represent this country at the United Nations amounts to renting a billboard for advertising against the Second Amendment,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “While he was Seattle’s mayor, Greg Nickels supported every anti-gun scheme put forth by Washington CeaseFire, the Northwest’s most active gun prohibition lobby.

“Nickels is a gun ban proponent,” he continued, “so his appointment as an alternate to the UN is a clear signal of Barack Obama’s intention to rubber stamp the UN’s global gun ban agenda. We had to sue Nickels while he was still Seattle’s mayor to overturn his illegal city parks gun ban. Now he gets to push his anti-gun philosophy on a world scale. It hardly seems a coincidence that Nickels has been appointed by the Obama administration at a time when the UN is considering treaties and initiatives that pose a serious threat to the Second Amendment.”

Nickels was turned out of office in 2009, which was something of a feat in a liberal enclave like Seattle, Gottlieb recalled. His defeat in the primary demonstrated the degree of alienation voters felt from a politician who once epitomized the Seattle liberal establishment.

“By naming Greg Nickels as an alternate representative at the UN,” Gottlieb stated, “President Obama has essentially told America’s 85 million gun owners that their firearm civil rights are in jeopardy. Nickels cannot be counted on to defend the Second Amendment because he would like to see it erased from the Constitution.”

The UN Small Arms Treaty continues to move forward. Hillary Clinton has indicated support for this treaty, which former UN Ambassador John Bolton fought as not within the US Constitution. But then we have seen that the Constitution means little to this regime.  If you click the above link, the treaty may look sort of innocuous, but among the provisions are setting up an international gun registry, and banning semiautomatic weapons.

Now, everywhere it has been tried, gun registries have failed in their stated purpose: controlling crime.  What they do is create more red tape for the law abiding, while allowing the criminal to freely acquire whatever weapons he desires.  The same thing is true of nations, by the way.  The law abiding nation will be put through all kinds of efforts to weed out a few guns, while rogue states will be able to get all the weapons they wish to pay for.  n sources, but how many arrests and convictions has that resulted in?  I could find none.  A big, fat zero.  And what sanctions will be placed on rogue nations for not complying with the treaty?  If past is prologue, nothing they can't get around if they are so inclined.  Having a gun registry would not stop what is happening on our Southern border, nor any other gun violence around the world.

The Canadian gun registry stands as a cautionary tale. Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America reports that the Canadian Gun Registry has been in place for handguns since 1934, and has not been used one time to solve a crime. Not once.  But it gets better:

Breitkreuz cited the Toronto Police Chief, Julian Fantino, who has called gun registration a waste of cash. This is partly due to the fact that about 75 percent of the handguns used in crime in Toronto were never registered. The money would be better spent on real cops doing real police work according to the chief. Many other Canadian police officials have publicly decried the waste of resources poured down the gun registration drain.

One of the concerns of gun registration everywhere is the potential for abuse. Breitkruez reports that there have been some suspicious break-ins of the homes of gun owners. It may be that the break-ins occurred with the help of information obtained illegally from the registry.

Another downside of the gun registry has been the deterioration of relations between police and other citizens. The registry treats people as suspects, and many Canadians have simply refused to register their guns. Nobody knows how many, but the number is generally put at several hundred thousand.

For most Canadians, the biggest scandal of the gun registry is the enormous cost overrun and the subsequent cover-up. The registry was supposed to cost a net of $2 million (Canadian dollars) after fees were collected. To date, the registry has cost over $1 billion and counting. A computer crash has compromised the integrity of the system as well.

Many Canadians are now openly rebelling, refusing to register their guns, and provoking arrest. Canadian officials who can not bring themselves to admit the failure of the program, risk the all important traditional respect for the law.

The gun grabbers think that our rights come from government, and that they'll be able to nullify the Second Amendment by ratifying this treaty.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Our rights come not from the governments of man but from our Creator.  They can not be taken away.  All that they will accomplish in the end is further eroding respect for the law.  They are like the cartoon character, busily sawing on a limb, not realizing that if he succeeds, the limb will fall and carry him with it.