Global Gun Control

[Fair&Balanced]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Any treaty or agreements with the UN are bogus and a waste of taxpayer money.

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty seems worthwile to me, as does the treaty on land mines.

Given that the US is probably the greatest source of illegal tracking in small arms, we might want to work with others to see how we can keep these weapons from drug trafficers, terrorist wannabees and from being forced into the hands of child mercenaries in Africa.

This alone is a cause for concern:

So that makes all the bullshit and fear mongering in the column justifiable?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Fair&Balanced

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty seems worthwile to me, as does the treaty on land mines.

Sounds like bull shit pandering to the UN to me.

The UN is an inept and worthless organization that lost it's luster long ago. It does give a platform for the poorer nations of the world to whine and cry about how the richer nations don't give them enough money, I will give them that much.

[Fair&Balanced]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Sounds like bull shit pandering to the UN to me.

The UN is an inept and worthless organization that lost it's luster long ago. It does give a platform for the poorer nations of the world to whine and cry about how the richer nations don't give them enough money, I will give them that much.

You dont think the UN treaty banning anti-personnel mines, which btw, the US did not sign, made a difference?

According to the 2009 Landmine Monitor Report, signatory nations have destroyed more than 44 million mines since the entry into force in 1999. Eighty-six countries have completed the destruction of their stockpiles....

Through 2008, eleven states had cleared all known mined areas from their territory...

On 2 December 2009, Rwanda was declared free of landmines. The announcement was made at the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-Free World in Colombia. It follows a three year campaign by 180 Rwandan soldiers, supervised by the Mine Awareness Trust and trained in Kenya, to remove over 9,000 mines laid in the country between 1990 and 1994.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

A more standardized way for nations to work together to prevent or respond to illegal trafficking of small arms makes sense to me.

So why should the US not lead the discussion or at least be at the table rather than conspicuous by our absence. It doesn’t commit the US to signing any final document, but it still can make a difference in arms trafficking.

In fact, the likelihood that the US will be part of a UN Small Arms Treaty in 2012 or anytime soon is zero to none. Even if Obama were to sign it, it would still require ratification by a 2/3 vote in the Senate.

And, again, in any case, the US Constitution will always have pre-eminence over any treaty. The US Supreme Court has made that clear in several landmark cases.

The column in Forbes was nothing more than fear-mongering.

[gvidas]

Oh man. Landmines.

Did you ever hear of this guy?

From 1994 to 2007, Aki Ra grabbed a shovel, a stick, and a knife and personally went out into the jungles of the densely-populated Siam Reap region of Cambodia to remove Soviet, Chinese, and Vietnamese-constructed land mines. He almost single-handedly cleared out all the explosives surrounding Cambodia's primary tourist attraction – the incredible Temples at Angkor Wat – before turning his attention to local playgrounds and farmlands that had been off-limits for decades. For this guy to do this shizzle without wearing any kind of protective gear (he usually just went out in a pair of sandals and a button-down shirt) is so mind-flayingly insane that I kind of want to vomit a little. Thanks in no small part to the work of this one man, the number of accidental landmine casualties in Cambodia dropped from 3,047 to 1,109 in the three-year span from 1996 to 1999.

source

The museum he started is the #1 place I would like to visit in the world.

Eventually Aki Ra had removed so many landmines that his house was overflowing with the shit, so in 1998 he opened the Cambodian Landmine Museum as a place to displace the unexploded ordinance and educate people on how much landmines seriously suck balls. The place is now a registered NGO, and Aki spends less time personally removing mines and more time training everyone from local villagers to Cambodian Army soldiers in his insane, completely-unlicensed and largely-unapproved-by-any-rational-human-being strategy of digging up and disarming mines with his fists. He now has a team of over 1,000 people working in de-mining operations across the country, and claims that in the 16 years he has been on the job he's personally removed and cleared over 50,000 mines by himself.

The slightly less hyperbolic version of his story.