The ‘Merchant of Death’ Lobby

from Consortium News:


The ‘Merchant of Death’ Lobby
October 23, 2013

The U.S. gun industry doesn’t want any restrictions on its profit-making role as a global “merchant of death,” so its lobby has whipped half the Senate into line opposing a treaty aimed at curbing human rights crimes by regulating the illicit flow of weapons around the world, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

By Paul R. Pillar


Primitive opposition to the recently signed arms trade treaty surfaced again last week, in the form of a letter signed by 50 U.S. senators led by James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Jim Moran of Kansas, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. As with any time a group of American politicians says anything having to do with firearms, the Second Amendment gets invoked.

But the treaty has nothing whatever to do with the Second Amendment or rights contained within it. The treaty not only has no effect on well-regulated militias but also no effect on gun ownership by individual Americans.

The treaty’s stated purpose is to establish “the highest possible common international standards” for regulating the international trade in conventional arms and to combat the illicit trade in such arms, thereby contributing to the further goals of “international and regional peace, security and stability,” “reducing human suffering,” and promoting “cooperation, transparency, and responsible action” by the parties to the treaty.

In short, it has to do above all with curbing the flow of munitions across international borders and into the hands of the likes of Joseph Kony or Charles Taylor. But the political subtext in the United States evidently is that the gun lobby gets nervous whenever “arms” and any conjugation of “regulate” appear in the same document (even though that is true of the Second Amendment itself). ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/10/23/the-merchant-of-death-lobby/