Secretary of State John Kerry once again signed
the United Nations Arms Treaty on Wednesday, a move that supporters say will
help stop weapons from getting into the hands of criminals and terrorists worldwide
but critics contend is a backdoor assault on law-abiding gun owners.
The treaty would require nations to conduct a
detailed registration of all guns. The issue is dead on arrival in the U.S.
Senate, but one of the leading experts on guns says even if the agreement is
only ratified in other countries, it can still work to erode gun ownership in
America.
“The point of this is just to try to reduce legitimate
gun ownership in other countries. Eventually it has some feedback effect in the
United States. If Canadians are much less likely to own guns, gun control
activists will point to them and say, ‘Look how outlandish we are in the United
States,’” said John Lott, an economist who serves as president of the Crime
Prevention Research Center.
Lott is also the author of well-known books on
guns, including “More Guns, Less Crime” and “The Bias Against Guns.” He says
the stated purpose of the U.N. treaty sounds pretty harmless but the devil is
in the details.
Listen to the
WND/Radio America interview with John Lott: http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/obamas-next-backdoor-assault-on-2nd-amendment/
"The claimed purpose is to try to make sure
that the gun trade is regulated across countries. The claim is that terrorist
groups and other rebel groups around the world are getting guns because of
private gun owners there. It ignores the fact that almost all the guns that
these different groups get are from other governments, not from private
individuals," said Lott.
In addition to stifling weapons supplies to
terrorists, proponents of the treaty argue that mass registration will help
solve many criminal cases around the world as well.
Lott says that is simply not backed up by the
facts.
"In theory, if a gun is used in the
commission of a crime if left at the crime scene and it's registered to the
person who committed the crime, then you can use that gun to trace back and
find out who committed the crime," said Lott.
"The problem is that never really works.
The reason is pretty simple. One, crime guns are rarely left at the scene. Two,
when they are left at the scene, they're not registered to the person who
committed the crime," he added.
Lott says the ineffectiveness of gun
registration is proven over and over. In Canada, he says lawmakers recently
rescinded a mandate on long gun registration because it was accomplishing
nothing.
"It cost billions of dollars and it hadn't
solved any crimes. In fact, before the long gun registration was eliminated, it
was clear that even the handgun registration that has been around since the
mid-1930s had not been able to solve one single crime," said Lott.
It's the same story in the United States. Lott
says Hawaii has forced gun owners to register their weapons since 1960. He
recently took part in legislative hearings in the state, but he says the
testimony of another witness was most compelling.
"They had the Honolulu police chief come in
and they asked him some questions. They said, 'How many crimes have they been
able to solve in Hawaii as a result of it?' It was zero. They couldn't point to
a single crime that they had solved," said Lott.
Beyond the inability of gun registration to help
police catch criminals, Lott says the police chief explained what a drain the
policy is on law enforcement.
"They asked, 'Well, how much police time
does it take every year to go and implement this?' Just for the Honolulu Police
Department, it was about 50,000 hours of police time each year. That's 50,000
hours of police time that could have been used to go and solve real
crimes," he said.
Lott says taking police away from their cases
robs them of their best chance to solve crimes.
"It's extremely important, I think, in
terms of my research, in terms of reducing crime rates. Yet, here we want to go
and waste this huge amount of manpower that could be used to save lives and
protect people, to go and do this meaningless paperwork. I think the main point
of it is just to make it costly and difficult for people to go and own
guns," said Lott.
Lott does not expect the Obama administration to
claim this agreement is not actually a treaty and implement it unilaterally. He
says the most Obama could do is issue some new executive orders under the
auspices of the U.N. treaty.
Even then, Lott says the impact of those orders
could only go so far because the next president could rescind them. He believes
Obama is simply pushing another avenue for his tireless push for more gun
control.
"They're trying to do what they can in
order to make it costly for people to own guns and reduce gun ownership. This
is just one out of many ways that'll give them an excuse to implement a few
other executive orders that maybe they wouldn't have tried to push
otherwise," said Lott.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/obamas-next-backdoor-assault-on-2nd-amendment/
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