(IBD) Re-elected Obama Pushes Anti-Second Amendment U.N. Arms Trade Treaty Gun Grab

[Daniel John Sobieski]

Second Amendment: Within hours of re-election, the administration  fast-tracked a treaty in the United Nations that transcends borders and tramples  our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. It was no coincidence.

Less than 24 hours after President Obama's re-election, the U.S. Mission to  the United Nations helped move the U.N.'s Arms Control Treaty a step closer to  enactment. America joined 157 other nations in voting Wednesday to finalize the  treaty in March. None was opposed and there were 18 abstentions.

U.N. delegates and gun-control activists had complained that talks collapsed  in July largely because Obama feared attacks from Republican rival Mitt Romney  if his administration was seen as openly supporting the pact. But once the  election was over, the Obama administration had more flexibility to pull the  trigger on supporting the pact.

The Obama administration, which reversed long-standing U.S. opposition to the  treaty in 2009, says the treaty does not threaten our Second Amendment rights  and applies only to international arms trade. But its record of opposition to  private gun ownership and its deference to international bodies and their  authority give us pause.

So does a paper by the U.N.'s Coordinating Action on Small Arms. It notes  that arms have been "misused by lawful owners" and demands that the "arms trade  therefore be regulated in ways that would ... minimize the misuse of legally  owned weapons."

Is an American defending his home against intruders just such a "misuse"?

Even if the treaty applied only to transfers of small arms between nations,  would that mean restrictions on our ability to aid allies such as Israel and  Taiwan? Would we be forbidden from supporting resistance movements around the  world that rise up against the very dictators who support this treaty?

The treaty establishes a bizarre moral equivalence between countries that  trade arms to defend freedom and those that do so to suppress and extinguish  it.

Interestingly, just as the world's worst human rights violators sat on and  often chaired the U.N. Human Rights Council, Iran, arms supplier extraordinaire  to America's enemies, was elected to a top position at the U.N. Conference on  the Arms Trade Treaty that was held in New York in early July.

Read More At IBD:  http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/110812-632785-obama-pushes...