NRA's silence on UN arms treaty surprises gun control campaigners

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 March 2013 13.48 GMT

The National Rifle Association is so tied up fighting new gun restrictions in the wake of the Newtown shooting that it has failed so far to mount its expected lobbying blitz against a new international arms control control treaty.

With just a few weeks to go until the world's first Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is put to a final vote at a UN conference in New York campaigners have voiced surprise at the NRA's relative silence on the issue. Until the Newtown tragedy, in which 20 young children died in their classrooms on 14 December, the UN's attempt to contain the loosely regulated international trade in weapons had been one of the gun lobby's biggest targets.

Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president, personally addressed the previous ATT conference last July, telling the meeting that "no foreign influence has jurisdiction over the freedoms our Founding Fathers guaranteed to us". When the negotiations broke down – in no small measure because of US resistance to the global regulations on weapons sales – the NRA gloated that this was "a big victory for American gun owners, and the NRA is being widely credited for killing the UN ATT".

But ahead of the final ATT conference, which opens on 18 March, the NRA has been notable by its absence. Though the organisation continues to vow that it will do all in its power to prevent the arms trade coming into effect – arguing that it is a "ticking time-bomb" and "the most serious threat to American gun owners in decades" – it has not been applying the same strong-arm tactics as it did in 2012.

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