Senate Votes to Keep US Out of UN Arms Trade Treaty

Wolverton, II, J.D.
New American
March 24, 2013

In the pre-dawn hours Saturday, the Senate approved a measure “to uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.”

By a vote of 53-46, the Senate passed the amendment to the budget bill sponsored by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.).

This reporter is in New York covering the negotiations at the UN aimed at drafting a treaty calling for the eradication of small arms trade, sale, and transfer by anyone other than UN-approved governments.

“We’re negotiating a treaty that cedes our authority to have trade agreements with our allies in terms of trading arms,” Inhofe before the vote on his amendment. “This is probably the last time this year that you’ll be able to vote for your Second Amendment rights.”

According to a story in The Hill, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) proposed his own amendment “that clarified that under current U.S. law, treaties don’t trump the Constitution and that the United States should not agree to any arms treaty that violates the Second Amendment rights.” Leahy’s amendment also passed.

A similar resolution sponsored by Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) is currently pending before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Moran’s measure declares that it is the sense of Congress that:

The President should not sign the Arms Trade Treaty, and that, if he transmits the treaty with his signature to the Senate, the Senate should not ratify the Arms Trade Treaty; and

until the Arms Trade Treaty has been signed by the President, received the advice and consent of the Senate, and has been the subject of implementing legislation by Congress, no Federal funds should be appropriated or authorized to implement the Arms Trade Treaty, or any similar agreement, or to conduct activities relevant to the Arms Trade Treaty, or any similar agreement.

Representative Mike Kelly (R-Penn.) has offered a companion measure in the House.

Both the Moran and Kelly resolutions declare that the Arms Trade Treaty “poses significant risks to the national security, foreign policy, and economic interests of the United States as well as to the constitutional rights of United States citizens and United States sovereignty.”

The measures also points out that UN gun grab “fails to expressly recognize the fundamental, individual right to keep and to bear arms and the individual right of personal self-defense, as well as the legitimacy of hunting, sports shooting, and other lawful activities pertaining to the private ownership of firearms and related materials, and thus risks infringing on freedoms protected by the Second Amendment.”

As The New American has reported from the United Nations last week, negotiators at the Arms Trade Treaty conference, are planning to effectively repeal the Second Amendment by replacing the Constitution with the UN Charter and by replacing God with government as the source of all rights, including the right to keep and bear arms.

Principally, this treaty would eradicate the Second Amendment in two ways: First, by mandating that state signatories create a registry of gun owners, manufacturers, sellers, and traders; second, by making it nearly impossible for civilians to purchase ammunition.

The most egregious affront to the sovereignty of the United States is that there is not a single word in the Arms Trade Treaty protecting the unalienable right to keep and bear arms. In fact, the latest draft of the proposed agreement only recognizes private ownership of firearms for “recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities.” This is a significant and unacceptable infringement on the rights protected by the Second Amendment.

In truth, however, Americans needn’t to look to an unaccountable, unelected body of globalist bureaucrats for reaffirmation of the rights already guaranteed by our Constitution.

While it is unlikely that the Senate would ratify the treaty in its present form (67 senators would have to vote to approve it), when it comes to disarming citizens of this country, President Obama has shown that he will not be deterred by congressional inaction or by constitutional limits on his authority.

Although in reality, treaties that violate the Constitution are prima facie null, void, of no legal effect, the Supreme Court has come down on both sides of the supremacy issue.

In a pair of contradictory decisions, the Supreme Court has held that “No doubt the great body of private relations usually fall within the control of the State, but a treaty may override its power” (Missouri v. Holland) and “constitutional rights cannot be eliminated by a treaty” (Reid v. Covert).

This conflict of cases creates a situation where, as Alan Korwin wrote in 2012 at the time of the previous round of negotiations on the Arms Trade Treaty, “While some of us would surely and boldly draw the lines where they are ‘supposed’ to be, i.e., in line with our natural and historic rights, the forces aligned against the Second Amendment have no problem arguing vigorously for its destruction, regardless of any of these details, and therein lies the greatest threat we face.”

It would appear that regarding the preservation of the right to keep and bear arms, the states will be required to uphold the liberties protected by our Constitution in the face of federal collusion with the international forces of civilian disarmament.

The latest round of Arms Trade Treaty negotiations are scheduled to wrap up on March 28. Should the U.S. delegation agree to participate in the agreement (and President Obama has instructed them to do so), the treaty will be sent to the Senate for consideration.

Americans who refuse to allow the UN to seize their guns and ammo still have time to contact their senators and remind them of the oath they took to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” including the right to keep and bear arms.

FEMA Preparing Police for 'Domestic War'

Infowars.com
March 23, 2013

On FEMA’s Center for Domestic Preparedness site, a listing for Program J, known as “Field Force Operations,” details how DHS has been training state and local law enforcement “to prepare for and successfully mitigate threat incidents involving civil disorder” should “National Special Security Events” or NSSEs occur.

Texas Moves to Repatriate its Gold from the Federal Reserve

Emily Ramshaw and Aman Batheja
Texas Tribune
March 23, 2013

Call it the Rick Perry gold rush: The governor wants to bring the state’s gold reserves back from a New York vault to Texas.

And he may have legislative support to do it. Freshman Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, is carrying a bill that would establish the Texas Bullion Depository, a secure state-based bank to house $1 billion worth of gold bars owned by the University of Texas Investment Management Co., or UTIMCO, and stored by the Federal Reserve.

The idea isn’t entirely new. Some Republicans worked on a gold bill last session that was never filed. And gold-standard-backing Ron Paul, the former Lake Jackson congressman, has raised repeated concerns about the safety of states’ gold supplies.

“If you think gold is a hedge, or a protection, you always want it as close to the individual and the entity as possible,” Paul told The Texas Tribune on Thursday. “Texas is better served if it knows exactly where the gold is rather than depending on the security of the Federal Reserve.”

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Gun Owners Sue New York Government to Restore 2nd Amendment

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 22, 2013


The New York affiliate of the National Rifle Association on Thursday requested an injunction to stop the state from denying residents their Second Amendment right and 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law.

Governor Andrew Cuomo and State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman are named in the lawsuit.

The NRA lawsuit claims New York’s recently enacted anti-gun legislation violates the constitutional rights of “law-abiding citizens to keep commonly possessed firearms in the home for defense of self and family and for other lawful purposes.”

The lawsuit neglects to mention the primary reason the founders included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights – as a bulwark against tyranny.

“It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us,” a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, Andrew Napolitano, wrote in January before the New York governor and the state legislature pushed through the most restrictive and draconian anti-Second Amendment law in the nation.

The lawsuit targets New York’s unconstitutional ban on so-called “high-capacity” magazines and semiautomatic firearms erroneously classified as “assault weapons.”

“Criminals have and use magazines without any limitation in capacity,” the lawsuit contends. “The act’s provisions on magazines put law-abiding citizens at a grave disadvantage to criminals, who will not comply with the seven-round limit.”

It says the phrase “assault weapons” is “a pejorative term” used “to describe countless numbers of rifles, handguns and shotguns that were commonly possessed under prior law.”

The NRA is not challenging other provisions of the law, namely tougher penalties for gun crimes.

Government Cover-up of Ammo Buys Implodes

Silence, secrecy and shoddy attempts at debunking the facts have led to Congressional scrutiny

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Mar 22, 2013


The failure on behalf of the federal government to provide any explanation for why the Department of Homeland Security is arming to the teeth with high powered weapons and billions of hollow point bullets, as well as crude efforts by mainstream media mouthpieces to debunk the war-like preparations, have backfired massively, propelling the story to a viral status.

As we reported today, 15 Congressman have written a letter to the DHS demanding to know why the federal agency is buying so many rounds of ammunition and whether the purchases are part of a deliberate attempt to restrict supply to the American people.

Big Sis has remained silent on the issue, refusing to answer questions from reporters and even from multiple elected representatives, about the ammo buys.

The continued huge orders for weapons and bullets have prompted attendances at gun shows to explode, as gun store owners say they having to contend with significant national shortages.

Efforts to portray the very real stockpiling by the federal agency as a conspiracy theory have fallen flat on their face, and have only served to further highlight how suspect the DHS’ actions are.

When Media Matters and Raw Story both recently attacked Fox Business host Lou Dobbs for daring to raise the issue on his show, it quickly became clear that neither had any prevailing counter point, and were dismissing the facts only by regurgitating a glib statement of a single DHS official.

Media Matters, which has been documented to be little more than an Obama administration mouthpiece, reported that, “The claim that DHS bought a 1.6 billion bullet stockpile is also misleading,” while simultaneously admitting that “DHS did buy 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition.”

The source of the claim that concerns over the bullet buys are a conspiracy theory or “misleading,” is a February 14 Associated Press report which did not conduct any actual investigation into why the DHS was purchasing the ammo, instead regurgitating a statement from DHS official Peggy Dixon, who claimed the bullets were bought in bulk to save money and were for training purposes only.

As we have tirelessly noted, however, hollow point bullets are completely unsuitable for training purposes because they cost significantly more money compared to standard firing range bullets. In one fell swoop, this fact debunks claims that the agency was attempting to save money argument and is intending to use the ammo in training exercises.

Military veterans and ammunition experts have also confirmed that they have never used hollow points for training purposes, expressing confusion at why the DHS is buying up so many of them.

When Atlantic Wire and Politico also attempted to debunk the issue, they completely ignored the DHS’ admitted purchases of close to 2 billion bullets, instead focusing only on the Social Security Administration’s purchase of 174,000 bullets, as if it were some how proof that the DHS is not involved in stockpiling at all.

Snopes.com, a site that profits from debunking anything and everything, also failed to even address the DHS bullet purchases, again pointing only to SSA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration purchases.

Apparently, the mainstream media has failed to grasp that concerns about government activity cannot be “debunked” by merely repeating glib statements issued by government officials, particularly given the amount of times the DHS has been caught lying about other issues such as TSA body scanners and most recently with Janet Napolitano’s erroneous claim that the sequester debate was causing delays in airports.

Amidst all the so-called “debunkings” of the bullet buys, the aforementioned media sources have also conveniently omitted details regarding the DHS’ purchase of 7,000 fully automatic assault rifles, as well as a $2 million dollar relationship with a contractor that recently had to apologize for producing shooting targets of pregnant women, children and elderly gun owners depicted in residential settings.

The DHS has also been busy buying large supplies of body armor, leading to shortages. Last year, the agency put out an urgent order for “riot gear” in anticipation of civil unrest. The agency has also ordered bullet-proof checkpoint booths and hired hundreds of new security guards to protect government buildings over the course of the last 12 months. There have also been reported purchases of around 2,700 armored trucks.

None of this has been addressed by the mainstream media. Government silence, sustained secrecy, and media mouthpieces declaring it isn’t real has only served to implode an already shoddy cover-up attempt, further shining a light on the secretive prepping actions of Big Sis and her army of goons.

Police Departments Beg And Barter For Ammo While DHS Buys Up 1.6 Billion Rounds In Past Year

Gregory Gwyn-Williams, Jr.
CNS News
March 22, 2013

The nationwide shortage of ammunition has left many police departments scrambling to get their hands on the necessary rounds – with some even bartering among each other.

Meanwhile, Rep. Timothy Huelskamp (R-Kansas) says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has failed to respond to multiple members of Congress asking why DHS bought more than 1.6 billion rounds in the past year.

Police Chief Cameron Arthur of Jenks, Oklahoma says, “Ammunition and assault weapons in general have skyrocketed…In addition to the fact, not only is it a lot more expensive, but the time to get it could be six months to a year, or in some cases even longer.”

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