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President’s
Message
Putting the Arms Trade Treaty into perspective.
by Sheldon Clare
Canada’s NFA was in New York to protect your right to
own and use firearms. After a week of meetings in New
York listening to the representatives of 193 countries
argue for an Arms Trade Treaty any sensible observer
would be stocking up on ammo and heading for the
hills. Instead, I brought my laptop and my smart phone
and headed to the meetings.
Without breaking this all down into who said what,
there seem to be four main categories under which
participants in these talks might be classified. If you
want the details, you can see the position papers of
the participating countries and groups at: http://www.
un.org/disarmament/ATT/statements/
Canada’s NFA was there as part of the World Forum on
the Future of Sport Shooting Activities. Our paper was
presented by hand to all of the delegations and NGOs
and has been published on our website.
First, there are those that seem naïve and idealistic.
This is the place of many of the anti-firearm Non-
Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The world view
of these folks tends to be one of “…if we eliminate
small arms and light weapons there will be peace. If
we control, mark, and track all ammunition we can
prevent all sorts of misery in the world.” The basic
failure of that position is that firearms and ammunition
are basically simple tools and they can be readily made
without complex technology. As well, arms control is
a legal fiction – a chimera. Trusting a piece of paper to
protect you is problematic at best. In the real world,
arms control is like anything prohibited, all such laws
do is drive up the value of the illegal item. Those who
want them will find some government to sell them
what they want, if they can’t make it themselves. The
NGOs want to disarm everyone, while the idealistic
government statements are aimed at disarming nations,
rather than individuals. Some certainly want individual
civil disarmament too, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
The second cluster of arguments tends to be based
upon a combination of national self-interest and greed.
The goal from those taking this view appears to be
that more arms control will lead to more money for
our particular regime. Allegedly, the UK is pushing
the ATT primarily to reduce competition for the sale
of its military hardware. The money would come in a
number of ways, but the two main cash cows would be
the implementation support unit, a body which some
see as Team UN Arms Control World Police, complete
with record keeping and transfer tracking. The second
cash cow is an innocuous sounding dream called the
Victim’s Assistance Fund. Many third world countries
see this as a means to obtain funding. There is some
logic, twisted though it may be, in wanting money for
such a project; after all, Canadians have some experience
with the high cost of licensing and registration which
is why we have gotten rid of part of that scheme – it
would certainly be expensive, and the UN is funded by
its member countries who get all of their money from
taxes. Under the Victim’s Assistance Fund proposal,
victims of gun violence would be compensated for their
injuries through a fund established by the UN and paid
for by its wealthy member countries.
Putting aside the fact that such a fund would be
insanely expensive to administer, let alone award,
the potential exists for the fund to be used corruptly.
For example, consider a poverty stricken family that
decides that giving a child a bullet wound could lead
to financial compensation. Sounds farfetched? Not
really, I personally saw child beggars in Africa who had
been injured by their relatives so as to make them more
pitiful and thus better at begging. The other aspect of
6 September - October www.nfa.ca