The Power to Tax is the Power to Destroy

U.N. Gun Control Scheme

The U.N. has earned its reputation as the largest anti-self-defense organization in the world. Their lust for depriving individuals of firearms for self-defense is strong and growing.

They have been promoting a universal gun registration program in order to set the stage for confiscation.

Consider who comprises the U.N. Communist China is the largest thugocracy in the world. Other countries suffering from a variety of crooks and thugs include Syria, Sudan, Lybia, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Iran and North Korea. We are supposed to take them seriously because they send their goons all dressed up in suits to U.N. meetings.

The only contact we should have with these tyrants is through the guns that we should be selling to freedom fighters in their countries. That is precisely why the U.N. - the mouthpiece for most of the world’s organized criminal syndicates - wants to disarm individuals. The U.N. is on record wishing to restrict gun sales to governments only.

Jaques Chirac, that well-known champion of freedom for the Iraqi people, has entered the debate with a proposal only a socialist could love - a tax on gun purchases by individuals, to be collected by the U.N.

Perhaps Chirac is seeking to replace the billion dollar piggy bank that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan lost when Sadam Hussein stopped signing over oil checks to the U.N. Annan had unsupervised access to the U.N. fund built up from its cut of the Oil for Food (actually Palaces) deal with Iraq. Chirac seems undisturbed that Annan’s fiscal probity is a bit lacking, and might not be the best place to put any revenues.

Ironically, Chirac had one group of folks who would be exempt - manufacturers. He wants to stick it to individual buyers since France makes lots of guns. Chirac helpfully suggested that taxing gun buyers might be easier to impose than the Tobin tax. The Tobin tax has been proposed as a levy on currency transactions.

Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva, a socialist gun grabber, suggested that taxing weapons manufacturers would be a good way to eliminate world hunger. Of course, he is not interested in the hungry of the world, as he claims, because he really wants to use the tax to price guns out of the reach of all but government buyers.

A question none of these folks deal with is - where is the authority for the U.N. to levy a tax? Most Americans do not make this an issue with our elected officials, so the U.N. mess continues to rock along. But we should be asking them: “What is their authority?”

Unhappily, these socialists have a somewhat plausible argument. When the U.S. agreed to join the U.N., we agreed to allow the U.N. to tell the U.S. how much tax money to send to the international body (our dues). Since our Constitution says that the House of Representatives is to originate all revenue bills, joining the U.N. without amending our Constitution amounts to an unconstitutional act.

WorldNetDaily (June 8, 2003) quotes a State Department official who requested anonymity regarding the U.N.’s gun control proposals saying: “Those are just recommendations - and surprisingly, a number of countries, including the U.S., take them up on those recommendations. In fact, we support all 24 of those recommendations.” (June 3, 2003)

U.N. gun taxes plus U.N. gun control equals big trouble. This is an important reason for supporting Rep. Ron Paul’s bill (H.R. 1146) that would get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S. While the bill does not say where the U.N. should go, I can think of several capitals where it would be more suitably headquartered: Beijing, Damascus, Khartoum, Tripoli, Harare, Havana, Teheran, Pyong-Yang - you get the idea.

Larry Pratt is the Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, a national gun lobby with more than 300,000 members, located at 8001 Forbes Place, Springfield, VA 22151. The GOA phone number is 703-321-8585 and their website is www.gunowners.org At the website, instructions will be found on how to contact members of Congress, their voting records, plus all the latest news about Second Amendment issues. GOA is, according to Congressman Ron Paul, “The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington.”

[VLRC Comment—Jon Dougherty’s June 8, 2003, article in WorldNetDaily, UN to host global gun control event, explains how the aim of the latest U.N. Conference backs measures to track, confiscate, and destroy various weapons:

The U.N. Program of Action, or PoA, “sets the first global norms of good behavior to reduce small-arms proliferation,” says a statement by the U.N. Small Arms Conference. “By agreeing to this document, all countries have formally committed themselves to take action” regarding the proliferation of “illicit” small arms.

Among the provisions in the PoA agreed upon by member states:

A commitment to make illicit gun production/possession a criminal offense;
The establishment of a national coordination agency on small arms;
A pledge to identify and destroy stocks of surplus weapons;
Track “officially held guns”;
The notification of nations who were the original supplier of weapons when those weapons are re-exported;
The marking of guns and light weapons at the point of manufacture, so they can be tracked and traced globally;
And the maintenance of gun manufacturing records.

In other words, GLOBAL GUN REGISTRATION!

The United Nations has a long history of pushing an anti-gun agenda. As early as Sept. 24, 1999, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called on members of the Security Council to “tackle one of the key challenges in preventing conflict in the next century” – the proliferation and “easy availability” of small arms and light weapons. Annan identified them as the “primary tools of violence” in conflicts throughout the world.

The United Nations defines small arms as weapons designed for personal use, while light weapons are those designed for several persons operating as a crew. Together, however, such weapons account for virtually every kind of firearm from revolvers, pistols, rifles, carbines and light machine guns all the way to heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, portable anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, mortars up to 100-mm caliber, and land mines.

“Even in societies not beset by civil war, the easy availability of small arms has in many cases contributed to violence and political instability,” said Annan. “Controlling that easy availability is a prerequisite for a successful peace-building process.”

The meaning of “peace-building”, in the language of the U.N. and its supporting web of communist/fascist state dictatorships, is the process of imposing controls on citizens of a nation which result in the “absence of resistance to the state”— or of resistance to the One World Government tyranny being pushed by the U.N.

While the U.N. and its corrupt leaders, such as Kofi Annan, talk of peace, they promote policies of genocide, starvation, and wars of conquest by totalitarian nations. U.N. “peacekeeping missions” are thinly-disguised operations to ensure U.N. puppets and “freedom fighters” overturn legitimate governments, remain in power and eliminate all resistance.

An essential U.N. objective is control of land and natural resources. To achieve this objective, private property, and private gun ownership, must be eliminated. This U.N. policy was first adopted in 1976 at the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver, British Columbia. Its final report states:

Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice…Public control of land use is therefore indispensable…”

[Ask your elected representatives why they continue to give aid and comfort to America’s enemy, the United Nations.—L. M. Schwartz]