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  • 2010-05-22 (xsd:date)
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  • U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (en)
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  • The concept of trying to crack down on the illicit trading of conventional arms through the development of an international agreement setting standards for legal arms trading has been in process in the United Nations (UN) since 2006, when the General Assembly passed a resolution titled Toward an arms trade treaty which called upon the UN secretary-general to survey member states on the feasibility, scope and draft parameters for a comprehensive, legally binding instrument establishing common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms. The administration of President George W. Bush was opposed to such efforts, stating that they preferred national controls to international agreements, and in several votes on resolutions and procedures related to a UN arms trade treaty from 2006 through 2008 the United States either cast the lone dissenting vote or was one of a very small number of member nations voting in the negative. The administation of President Barack Obama has been more receptive to UN efforts to craft an international agreement on the small arms trade, however, as reported in the October 2009 Reuters news article cited in the example text reproduced above. That month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement proclaiming that The United States is committed to actively pursuing a strong and robust treaty that contains the highest possible, legally binding standards for the international transfer of conventional weapons, and the U.S. voted in favor of moving forward with plans for a 2012 UN conference on drafting an arms trade treaty. In March 2013 a finished version of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) was finally presented to the U.N. General Assembly, and that body approved the treaty by a vote 154 to 3 (with 23 abstentions) on 2 April 2013. The U.S. was one of the member nations voting in the General Assembly to approve the treaty; only Iran, North Korea, and Syria voted against it. The treaty was finally signed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in September 2013, but the treaty still requires ratification by fifty U.N. signatories before it goes into effect (so far only seven nations have committed to that step), and it still requires approval by the U.S. Senate before the United States commits to its terms. The above-referenced piece of scarelore about the United States' having already entered into a such a treaty — one which supposedly provides a legal way around the 2nd Amendment and will result in a complete ban on all weapons for US citizens — is erroneous in all its particulars: As Rachel Stohl, a senior associate with the Managing Across Boundaries initiative at the Stimson Center and co-author of the book The International Arms Trade, noted: In short, there is no legal way around the 2nd Amendment other than a further amendment to the Constitution that repeals or alters it, or a Supreme Court decision that radically reinterprets how the 2nd Amendment is to be applied. Updated An item circulated in April 2013 claimed to identify 46 senators that voted to give your rights to the U.N. in reference to a Senate vote on the U.S. Arms Trade Treaty: However, the measure voted upon was not the treaty itself, but a non-binding test amendment expressing opposition to the ATT which was tacked onto an unrelated congressional budget resolution. The record of the U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote confirms that all the senators who voted against the amendment were Democrats or independents. (en)
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