[Ed: Dr. Faria first published this August 6 on Hacienda Publishing.]
The truth is the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT; formally the UN Small Arms Treaty) has failed to materialize because the negotiators have not been capable of reaching a consensus, but as Gun Owners of America (GOA) stated years ago, “It would be a mistake to believe that it spells the end of the effort to regulate small arms worldwide.”
GOA is correct. The Seventh Conference of the ATT will again reconvene August 30-September 3, 2021 in Geneva, Switzerland. Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry signed the treaty for the U.S. in 2013. But then, Obama’s gun control agenda floundered in his second term, when in 2014 the Republicans gained 13 new U.S. House seats and regained the majority in the U.S. Senate.
President Trump was elected in 2016 and speaking at the National Rifle Association meeting on April 26, 2019, informed NRA members that he would un-sign the treaty. President Trump kept this promise and on July 18, 2019, notified the UN that the U.S. had terminated its legal obligations to the Treaty.
In short, for years the UN has been trying to formalize a global, civilian disarmament measure with this Arms Trade Treaty and circumventing the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The UN has trampled on and dictated national policy to other sovereign nations in environmental, criminal, and even global tax issues — so why not, the globalist elite ask themselves, try again and enforce universal gun control and include America? The fact of the matter is that the struggle to preserve the right to civilian gun ownership worldwide, including in the U.S., is an ongoing effort, and elitist, globalist organizations are bent on disarming and controlling citizens so as to make their one-world-government dream (and our nightmare) a living reality.
Since the Democrats in 2021 are still pushing for ratification of the Treaty and gun control remains on their agenda, Biden will likely re-sign this authoritarian UN Treaty in the next few months.
But unfortunately, it isn’t only from the United Nations that citizens of the civilized world have to fear the globalists’ drive for gun control. The European Union (EU) has already joined in the act, and all member nations are targeted — not just the pusillanimous Western nations and Scandinavia, but all of Europe where the EU holds sway. Both the Czech Republic and Poland have expressed concerns and with good historic reasons.
In 1938, Czechoslovakia, mother country of the Czech Republic, was sacrificed and betrayed by its allies, Great Britain and France. Soon after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was deceived by Hitler, returned to England with a piece of paper claiming that he had brought “peace in our time,” Czechoslovakia was invaded and the Nazis ended up taking all of Czechoslovakia. The truth is that the Czechs could not be protected by the promises of her allies or the military of their own government. Czechoslovakia became a giant armament factory and a fortress for the Nazis, run by SS General Reinhard Heydrich, governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, until his assassination in 1942.
Poland followed suit in 1939, wiped off the map in the German Blitzkrieg — invaded as it was from the west by the German Army, and from the east by the Russian Soviet army. Thus, Poland was quickly subjugated by her collectivist, totalitarian neighbors — the communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were allies and co-conspirators via the signed Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty (aka., Non-Aggression Pact of 1939) that succeeded in crushing and dismantling Poland and the Baltic nations.
After World War II, the masters were no longer the German Nazis but the “liberating” Russian communists, who in the aftermath occupied by force much of Central and all of Eastern Europe using the Soviet Army working in tandem with the KGB. The subjugated peoples were impoverished, disarmed, and enslaved.
With the exception of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, which was quickly crushed, and the Prague Spring in 1968, which was also almost immediately suppressed, no other major upheaval threatening the Soviet empire occurred until the 1980s with the rise of the Solidarity Movement and the resurgence of the Roman Catholic Church resistance to communism in Poland. Then the sudden tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 took place. The Evil Empire, having rotted to the core, imploded from within and the end of the USSR came in 1991.
So it is easy to comprehend the apprehension Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, former trampled nations and Soviet satellites, feel when contemplating citizen disarmament by the mandates of an EU that is still dominated by socialistic Western Europe, Scandinavia, France, and Germany. And given their tragic histories, these nations are not easily going along with the EU authoritarian gun control measures.
Indeed, the EU, having passed the European Firearms Directive that went into effect on June 13, 2017, has imposed severe restrictions on the civilian ownership of firearms and made it very difficult for EU citizens to obtain a State-issued firearms license. Home and family protection and self-defense are no longer legitimate reasons for civilian gun ownership.
Two months after the Directive was passed, the Czech Republic, that had promised to preserve their citizens’ right to gun ownership upon entering the EU, filed a legal challenge in the European Court of Justice to oppose the onerous gun control measures, demanding that the new gun controls be scrapped, postponed, or that certain countries be given exemptions from the measure.
In the summer of 2021, the Czech government moved to amend the country’s Constitution with a liberty Amendment that simply states, “the right to defend one’s life or the life of others, even with the use of weapons, is guaranteed.”
On July 21, 2021, the Czech Senate passed the measure with 54 of 74 senators approving it. The lower House had already approved the Amendment on June 28, with 139 out of 148 legislators.
Since the Amendment can be overruled by the EU restrictions, it will be difficult for the Czechs to exercise their newfound Natural Right to self- and collective defense. The idea is that the people can be trained in the use of arms and form a militia in collaboration with the country’s national armed forces, as an internal measure to combat terrorism and assist police in controlling crime.
I hope Poland, Hungary, and other awakening nations follow suit, and that the U.S., which is seemingly going in the opposite direction under the Biden administration, does not discard American rights and freedoms. The Czech example is a first step towards the God-given or Nature-derived right to armed self-defense and preservation of their freedom from the authoritarian impingement of the globalist EU.
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— Miguel A. Faria, Jr, MD is a retired professor of Neurosurgery and Medical History at Mercer University School of Medicine. He founded Hacienda Publishing and is Associate Editor in Chief in Neuropsychiatry and World Affairs of Surgical Neurology International. He served on the CDC’s Injury Research Grant Review Committee. His latest book is America, Guns, and Freedom: A Journey Into Politics and the Public Health & Gun Control Movements (2019).