Furor over Ft. Hood shootings, change in US position at UN
December 15, 2009

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

Gunowners and those who support the moral right to self-defense seem to be up in arms over two recent events that have appeared in Gun Week as well as other media.

The first is the mass shooting at Fort Hood, TX, on Nov. 5 that set off a furious debate in the gun rights community about military regulations that prohibit soldiers from carrying firearms on military installations.

The other was the change in US position regarding negotiation of a binding international treaty regulating the trade in small arms.

Dave Workman had summarized some of the comment on the Fort Hood shootings he collected from the Internet, but the story didn’t quite make it in the last issue, so I will use some of his report here.

“Nemerov, who is based in Austin, wrote in his Examiner column headlined ‘Death by gun control’ that, ‘These soldiers were entrusted to carry fully automatic, military assault rifles when deployed to Afghanistan, where the shooter was about to be sent. But in America, these same soldiers are disarmed when on base,’ ” Workman wrote.

“Hofmann, a former paratrooper who was left paralyzed by a 2002 auto accident, predicted that the gun control lobby will attempt to exploit the massacre.

“White, based in Cleveland, observed, ‘Hasan, by himself, was able to wreak havoc at a secure military installation while reportedly armed with nothing but two handguns. How? Most of his intended victims were disarmed.’ ”

“ ‘This left highly trained fighting men and women at the mercy of a killer,’ he said.”

I will add to Workman’s report a brief comment from one soldier mustering out at Ft. Hood who was a close-up eye-witness to the shooting which I received through military and retired police sources. His account is a close-up look at what happened which cannot be printed here because he is likely to be a witness at the trial. But there is a brief passage I will quote without identifying the writer.

“He started shooting at us and we all dived back to the cars behind us. I don’t think he hit the couple other guys who were there. I did see the bullet holes later in the cars. First I went behind a tire and then looked under the body of the car. I’ve been trained how to respond to gunfire...but with my own weapon. To have no weapon, I don’t know how to explain what that felt like.” My emphasis.

UN disarmament
The push for control of all small arms through a United Nations brokered treaty gained some ground in the last quarter of 2009 when, as Gun Week reported in its Nov. 15 edition, the United States changed a long-standing policy position on negotiating a binding treaty and agreed to enter such diplomatic bargaining.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the change in US position on Oct. 14, saying the US would now support negotiations of an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) to regulate the international gun trade, a proposal which first gained traction in 2001.

Gun rights advocates, however, are calling the reversal both a dangerous submission of America’s Constitution to international governance and an attempt by the Obama administration to sneak into effect private gun control laws it couldn’t pass through Congress.

Several countries abstained from that vote, but the agitation for a treaty is coming from several countries, many of them in South America.

Bob Barr, a former congressman from Georgia and presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, warned that a treaty that looks like it’s all about fighting international crime will necessarily lead to erosion of Second Amendment gun rights:

“Even though (treaty advocates) all say, ‘We are not going to involve domestic laws and the right to keep and bear arms, that won’t be affected by all this,’ that’s nonsense,” Barr said. “There’s no way that if you buy into something like this and a treaty is passed regulating to ensure that firearms transfers internationally don’t fall into the hands of people that the UN doesn’t like, there’s no way that that mechanism will work unless you have some form of national regulation and national tracking.”

Clinton’s October statement of support for the treaty negotiations was filed with a caveat that the Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty operate under the consensus rule of decision-making, essentially that its provisions be adopted unanimously.

“Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the treaty,” she stated, “and to avoid loopholes in the treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly.”

But Bolton warned gunowners not to think the consensus rule will stop the treaty from passing.

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