The Arms Trade Treaty passed by the United Nations earlier this month would infringe on Americans’ Second Amendment rights and should be rejected, argues former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.
“While much of the treaty [pushed by the Obama administration] governs the international sale of conventional weapons, its regulation of small arms would provide American gun-control advocates with a new tool for restricting rights,” Bolton and John Yoo, a Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration,
wrote Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.
“Yet because the Constitution requires that two-thirds of the Senate give its advice and consent to any treaty, Second Amendment supporters still have a political route to stop the administration.”
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The treaty requires domestic regulation of “small arms and light weapons.” It also requires countries “to regulate brokering” of conventional arms. “The treaty offers no guarantee for individual rights,” said Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley
The gun-control advocates will turn to the treaty to argue the need for a national gun registry, for licenses for guns and ammunition sales, universal background checks, and even a ban of some weapons, the two men wrote. The treaty would let the White House bypass Congress to achieve these goals.
That’s why it’s crucial for the Senate to reject it, they said.
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