"Small Arms, as Deadly as WMD." 

            "Wherever arms flow, violence follows." 

These absurd and objectively inaccurate pronouncements come courtesy of the United Nations, which commences its international gun control summit in New York from June 26 to July 7, 2006.  According to the U.N. announcement, the summit targets "the proliferation of small arms and light weapons," and literally advocates their collection and wholesale destruction. 

Rather than saying, "wherever arms flow, violence follows," however, the U.N. could more accurately announce that "wherever guns are confiscated, genocide and violence follow." 

Lest one assume the U.N. merely seeks trans-global standards, consider the following press release:  "Member states should ... bring their own national legislation into compliance with the Council's measures."  It further asserts that, "particular attention was placed on the need to ... encourage harmonisation of national legislation."  Moreover, consider the following U.N. statement proffering the program's mandatory nature: 

"By unanimously adopting the Programme of Action in 2001, the UN Member states committed themselves to collecting and destroying illegal weapons, adopting and/or improving national legislation to help criminalize the illicit trade in small arms, regulating the activities of brokers, setting strict import and export controls, taking action against violators of such laws, and better coordinating international efforts to that end." 

Just what America needs – the U.N. dictating its gun laws. 

Which nations will comprise this summit?  The U.N. identifies twenty-eight participants, including the following international beacons of freedom:  Iran, China, Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, Benin, Senegal, South Africa, Bangladesh, Argentina, Columbia, Jamaica, and Peru. 

No word yet on whether the U.N. will notice Cuba's omission and expeditiously add it, just as it added Cuba, Sudan, Syria, Libya, and China to its "Human Rights Commission." 

The U.N. also officially invited several non-governmental participants, including the "Biting the Bullet Consortium" and the notorious London-based International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), whose website baldly proclaims, "Bringing the Global Gun Crisis Under Control."  IANSA's official site asserts that the U.S. is "the leading supplier of conventional arms to the developing world," that it has "one of the world's largest markets for small arms," and that "the private resale of guns is largely unregulated in the United States, making it difficult to prevent their acquisition." 

Ominously, their website further announces that "IANSA participants in the United States are working to: research the health and social impact of guns, educate the public on the risks of firearm ownership, promote policies to prevent criminal and youth access to guns, apply consumer product regulations to the gun industry, and support international efforts to curb the proliferation of small arms." 

Shockingly, the U.N. invited neither the nearby National Rifle Association nor the Second Amendment Foundation to provide intellectual balance to these international anti-American partisans congregating at the New York summit. 

What does the U.N. advocate doing with firearms themselves?  Once again, reality transcends farce, and the U.N.'s official website speaks for itself: 

"More than 60 countries have collected and destroyed large amounts of illegal small arms.  Different methods have been used, including 'Flames of Peace' bonfires (Burundi, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Haiti, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa); by crushing them with steamrollers, bulldozers, or tanks (Brazil, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Paraguay, Sri Lanka); by dismantling weapons (Argentina, Costa Rica, Timor-Leste, Uganda); by discarding in deep water (Senegal and others).  Other cost-effective and environmentally-friendly methods have also been used." 

That was not a misprint.  Leave it to the U.N. and IANSA to cite genocide-torn Cambodia, Congo, Haiti, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Timor, and the former Yugoslav republics as inspirational models, and to advocate gun bonfires, steamrollers, and literally dumping firearms into the ocean. 

Sadly, it hasn't occurred to the U.N. that disarming law-abiding citizens provides criminals and dictators a monopoly on firearms possession, eviscerates people's self-defense capabilities, and leads to precisely the sort of mass genocide experienced in those countries.  (Imagine the impossibility of a government attempting genocide against America's well-armed populace.  Yet the U.N. wants the world to follow those nations' examples, rather than America's.) 

Lest one disregard the summit as simply another inept and pointless U.N. boondoggle, consider the long-term strategy to completely eliminate firearms acknowledged by Pete Shields, former leader of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence: 

"The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country.  The second problem is to get handguns registered.  The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition – except for military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors – totally illegal."  (emphasis added) 

Britain has done precisely that, and now stands as the world's most-violent developed nation.  Their example proves once again that governments cannot and do not effectively protect law-abiding citizens, and that citizens' right to possess firearms is a necessary component of providing for self-defense and domestic security. 

Simply put, the U.N.'s anti-firearm summit next week is undeniably Phase One in the campaign to abolish firearm rights through small, inexorable steps.  Further, on the heels of last month's U.N. report calling for greater international speech and press restrictions, the summit illustrates precisely why Congress and the White House must immediately reconsider its enormous subsidies to such an anti-American conglomeration of despots, dictators, and tyrants. 

There is simply no excuse for America's continued disproportionate support of this corrupt organization.