President Trump Must Aggressively Oppose U.N. Gun Control Agenda

Is it time for the United States to walk away from the United Nations’ anti-firearm agenda?

Just last week in an appearance before a House subcommittee, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley defended President Trump’s proposed 40% reduction in our annual contribution to that international bureaucracy. In her testimony, Haley described the reaction by the U.N. to the proposed cut as “shocked.” The testimony drew the usual “the-sky-is-falling” response from Democrats and liberal Republican House members who year after year vote to continue America’s $3.3 billion-plus commitment.

For anyone familiar with the bloated and costly U.N. bureaucracy headquartered in New York City, however, there are myriad justifications for a cut-back such as Trump has proposed: the many scandals surrounding the U.N.’s “peacekeeping” operations; the duplication of functions among its numerous agencies and offices; documented mismanagement, fraud and outright corruption throughout the organization; excessively high salaries and benefits for its staff; and diplomatic immunity that insulates its employees from accountability.

To the laundry list of reasons that more than justifies a substantial cut in the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars donated each year to the U.N., should be added the millions spent over the past two decades by the U.N. to fund its gun-control agenda. Despite there being nothing in the Charter of the United Nations that would remotely provide a basis for the organization to involve itself in control of firearms as owned and used by millions of American citizens and individuals in other countries, the General Assembly has been engaged in just such an effort since the mid-1990s.

The ability of the United Nations to define for itself a function—in this case, regulation of the international trafficking in “small arms and light weapons” (a term which encompasses virtually all handguns, shotguns, and rifles in use by individuals in the United States and elsewhere)—and then keep that mission alive for decades is legendary. The Obama Administration, which shared the U.N. General Assembly’s anti-firearms philosophy, in 2013 actually signed a treaty—the Arms Trade Treaty or “ATT”—committing the United States to take steps furthering the international regulation of firearms that would, over time, impact domestic firearms policies in contravention of the Second Amendment.