U.N. Conference Ending, Freedom Winning!!
David Koppel at the Volokh Conspiracy - The CommU.N.ist small arms conference ended yesterday with no agreement on a final document and no plans for follow-up meetings. The United States delegate prevented both. Good for him. [geekwitha.45]
If a few hundred votes had changed in Florida in 2000, or if 60,000 votes had changed in Ohio in 2004, the results of the 2001 and 2006 U.N. gun control conferences would have been entirely different. There would now be a legally binding international treaty creating an international legal norm against civilian gun ownership, a prohibition on the transfer of firearms to "non-state actors" (such as groups resisting tyrants), and a new newspeak international human rights standard requiring restrictive licensing of gun owners. With a Presidential signature on such a treaty (even if the treaty were never brought to the Senate floor for ratification), the principles of the anti-gun treaty would be eroding the Second Amendment, through Executive Orders, and through the inclination of some courts to use unratified treaties as guidance in interpretting the U.S. Constitution.
This to me makes crystal clear the fatal flaw in democracy. The American constitutional republic is supposed to allow a vote on only a small number of enumerated government powers. Instead, even our absolute right to defend our lives can be stolen by 51% of the sheeple's "representatives". Bill of Rights enforcement is the only way, short of my preference of total anarchy, to fix it.
