UN small arms treaty fails on US, Russian opposition

Joker to Obama and Hilary - back off - or else...

Penny postcard of Dirty Harry's visit to United Nations Plaza

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. - The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Gotham City – The Joker sent a message to the White House; it said it's an act of political suicide to support regulation of gun sales, either domestic, or international.

A majority of U.S. Senators joined Batman's arch-nemesis; they sent their own message.

When a coalition of 51 Senators delivered a letter to the White House asserting they would never vote to ratify a United Nations treaty aimed at curtailing the international trade in small arms, the Obama Administration backed off its support for the measure.

Russian representatives at the United Nations echoed the opinion, and joined the U.S. by voting against the final version of the treaty at the end of a week-long conference on gun control on Friday.

According to Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) and 50 others, the effort to regulate a $60 billion a year global commerce in small arms - much of it illicit - “restricts the rights of law-abiding American gun owners.”

That sentiment echoed the position of the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers who lobbied long and hard against the proposal, which had earlier gained the enthusiastic approval of the President, Barack Hussein Obama, and the Secretary of State, Hilary Rodham Clinton.

In a similar writing, former UN Ambassador John Bolton said the treaty advocates “hope to use restrictions on international gun sales to control gun sales at home.” Ambassador Bolton and President George W. Bush had opposed the notion of international control of arms sales during the previous Administration, saying they preferred national laws to international laws to control the commerce in small arms across borders.

An Associated Press Fact Check pointed out that if the terms of an international treaty are counter to the provisions of the U.S. Constitution, the nation cannot ratify any such agreement.

The terms of the proposed treaty contained nothing that would infringe the right of the people of the U.S. to keep and bear arms, according legal experts versed in international law.(click here to read the text of a proposed Organization of American States regional arms control treaty opposed by the U.S. and Canada)

The news service, a product of an association of daily newspapers, concluded that the position held by the NRA and other gun control opponents are false.(click here for the minority report)

World opinion expressed in news dispatches throughout the globe attributed the sudden policy shift by the Obama Administration to public reaction to a mass shooting of theater patrons attending the premier of a Batman movie by an assailant costumed as The Joker, wearing a helmet, full body armor, and armed with an AR-15, a tactical shotgun, and two semiautomatic pistols at Aurora, Colorado.

The alleged gunman is a University of Colorado neuroscience doctoral candidate who had dropped out after participating in studies of behavioral control in that institution's laboratories.