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Global Peace is

Hiding Under a Jackboot

By William Lolli

CalNRA Contributing Editor

October 4, 1999

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has sent to a call to its member states to stem the proliferation of small arms around the world.

Restricting the flow of small arms will be a key challenge in preventing bloodshed in the next century, Annan told a special meeting of the Security Council last week.

"There is probably no single tool of conflict so widespread, so easily available, and so difficult to restrict, as small arms," he said.

"Not only are they the primary instrument of the murder of civilians who are increasingly targeted in the wars of our era. Unlike their victims, small arms survive from conflict to conflict, perpetuating the cycle of violence by their mere presence," Annan told U.N. ministers Friday [Sept 24, 1999].

The United Nations estimates the number of firearms in the world from 200 million to 500 million.

Okay, Kofi. So guns are bad. And since over 200 million small arms are owned by Americans, that would make America the most evil, blood-thirsty, and murderous country in the world in which to live, right?

It only stands to reason that the country with the most privately owned small arms must be the most dangerous and most oppressive place to live.

But of course we discover that America is where everyone wants to live. We find that America is the most free of the nations of the earth. We find that America is the safest country in which to live.

Indeed, the irony of the accusation is that it compels the opposite argument: If the freest, richest, most technologically advanced, and safest nation on earth privately owns nearly half of the world's small arms, should we not project that successful evidence onto the other nations of the world?

Would not the people of the other nations be likewise free, rich, and secure if they also were so armed; and had the guarantee in human-rights law that they as individuals had the right to arms as the means of self-defense from tyranny and oppression?

Of course the answer is yes, but that answer flies in the face of the accusers.

In the same month that Kofi Annan makes his plea, Assistant Secretary of State Strobe Talbot declares that the United States in the next century will cease to be a nation-state and is destined to join the community of nations under one Global Authority.

And while these statements are being made about the new era of peace and cooperation, and Russia successfully tests it's new intercontinental ballistic missiles during joint China-Russian military exercise; the UN continues to require greater authority over global gun-control, demanding larger peacekeeping forces, and a greater military presence throughout the world.

For any student of history, the song is the same old verse:

Give us your guns and we will give you peace.

Give us your land and we will give you security.

Give us your money and we will give you prosperity.

My position: Give them resistance so that we may give our children freedom.
 

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