Secretary of State John Kerry may have signed the controversial United Nations Arms Trade Treaty today, but tomorrow it begins gathering dust in the U.S. Senate, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms predicted.
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb noted that Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has already warned Kerry that the treaty “will collect dust alongside the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Kyoto Protocol, to name a few, which have all been rejected by the U.S. Senate and the American people.”
“If Secretary Kerry and President Barack Obama pursue this farce,” Gottlieb warned, “the full fury of American firearms owners could come back to haunt them. Second Amendment sovereignty is not up for grabs, and we will encourage our members and supporters to contact their senators about this treaty.”
For the ATT to be ratified requires two-thirds confirmation by the Senate. But Gottlieb noted, as did Sen. Inhofe in his letter to Secretary Kerry, that 53 senators have already indicated they will reject any treaty that threatens the Second Amendment.
“If this was all theatrics by the Obama administration,” Gottlieb observed, “the president and Secretary Kerry need better script writers. And we will remind the administration of the warning it received Wednesday morning from Sen. Bob Corker, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Senate has not given its advice or consent on this treaty, so ‘the Executive branch is not authorized to take any steps to implement the treaty.’ How does that look to the world when an administration can’t get one of its pet projects approved on Capitol Hill?
“We know that anti-gunners have this ‘thing’ about symbolic victories,” he concluded, “but just how much of a symbol is it if the treaty is filed in the dust bin? After Fast and Furious, Benghazi and Syria, that’s just what the Obama administration needs, another symbol of international ineptitude.”
With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.
