And lo, verily does Island Dweller throw down a little jotting:

Most illustrious Sultan of the Steppes:

Your faithful minion, though he be surrounded by water on all sides, still manages to maintain periodic contact with a former co-laborer for the Good, and a fellow follower of your missives known as Esteemed Associate. EA has recently penned the below to me, which I dutifilly forward for your august attention, knowing your fondness for firelocks and things associated therewith:

“Does it seem odd to you that we have simultaneous debates in our country on the sale of small arms between countries and the sale of small arms in our country? Some reports have extrapolated that the international arms trafficking treaty now being debated at the UN, and supported by our Administration, might require countries (like ours) to allow international scrutiny of gun transactions within their borders. It is opposed by Iran, Syria and North Korea.

We also have the Administration (not wanting to waste a crisis like Newtown) fervently pushing “new” gun control measures. In this debate we find that even the NRA is not completely averse to more thorough background checks.

What do you get when you put these two together? The accumulation of a huge database of American gun ownership and its release to other countries. What a deal! The real irony is that it may be the Three Stooges (Mahmoud, Bashar and Little Kim (not the 50s singer – ID) that are doing the most to protect Americans’ right to defend themselves.”

I thank you for the privilege of submission and eagerly await your comment.
Island Dweller

EA has an ironic but valid point. Not a lot of people know about the Arms Trade Treaty to which EA refers: it is another one of those United Nations treaties that ostensibly seeks to protect nations of the world from rogue bastards like Iran, Syria, and North Korea but ultimately is written to penalize the United States.

On its face, the ATT is a means to establish how weapons move from place to place and standardize the means by which they are tracked. For example, there are no means to track how a box of rifles could be purchased from Armalite by a French buyer and then sent via gray market to a buyer in Iran. All we know is that Armalite sent a bunch of rifles to France, and then suddenly they are showing up in terrorists’s hands.

Under the ATT, the French buyer would be required to fill out detailed paperwork that lists the rifles’s serial numbers, whom the ultimate recipient would be, and what the intent of the purchase is: sporting, home defense, military, law enforcement, and so on. This way, the UN could understand what percentage of law enforcement rifles wind up somehow in terrorist hands. That would be a good thing, no? And indeed the only three countries who voted against it are exactly the ones whom we are watching.

It is also clear that none of the people writing about the ATT understand its bigger implications as they universally do a bad job of describing it.

Okay, so you already know why this makes people nervous. When a French company buys a fleet of cars from Ford, does it fill out a lot of paperwork specifying where the cars are expected to wind up, and what the cars will be used for? Do we do this for building supplies, food, or medicine? Actually, we do: the UN has been arguing that weapons somehow keep getting exempted from this basic requirement: we can track underwear (true!) from its purchase in Des Moines all the way to a small shop in Kenya. But we cannot evidently explain how an AR-15 sold to a distributor in Lincoln, Nebraska, wound up in the bloody hands of a dead terrorist in Mali. Liberals and Progressives say the ATT will fix that. And none of this changes US law or affects the Second Amendment in any way since it does not affect buyers within the United States.

But there are other means to do this and if foreign governments want to track these transactions better, they should develop their own negotiated means to do so, rather than force the US to adopt international gun laws, say conservatives. Otherwise, you can see that an international database of gun purchases becomes instantly politicized and capable of subversion by foreign governments. What business is it of China, for one, if a Canadian hunter purchases a Benelli semi-automatic shotgun?

But that isn’t going to happen, plead the liberals, right Mr. President? You’re not going to allow this information to be used improperly, right? Dead silence from the White House. Okay, reply the liberals, then at the very least the President will reassure our dummy conservative friends that this treaty cannot be used to identify which Americans purchased weapons for purposes of home defense, right? Hello? Dead silence.

The bizarre silence from the White House on these basic questions is making more than just conservatives nervous. Remember that, contrary to popular opinion, many liberals love guns and hunting and home defense. As a result, many Democrats in Congress are big-time gun supporters—and even Harry Reid is a little perplexed by the value of the ATT.

As a treaty, two-thirds or better of the US Senate must agree to ratify the treaty and in a recent test vote the treaty was denied 53-46. As we keep seeing, the Progressive Left continually underestimates the popularity of gun control measures. Even liberals like guns.

The Czar’’s take is in line with most major opponents of the Treaty and revolves around the biggest concern of all—which we haven’t even covered yet. That concern is that specific elements within the Treaty actually conflict with state and local laws that are already on the books. Secretary of State Kerry made a (for him) passionate speech recently insisting that the ATT does not violate the Second Amendment, but like many blunt tools in the Progressive administration refuses to acknowledge that the ATT violates the Tenth Amendment.

In short, the United Nations does not have legal authority to change the laws of the States. Who gives a fig what the Federal government thinks about the ATT? The Senators represent the States equally, and God help us but the US Senate is there to protect the rights of the States equally. Not surprisingly, a decent majority of Democrat and Republican senators agree the ATT is bad for State jurisdiction.

As liberals learn more about this nakedly Progressive treaty (control! control!), they like it less and less, as well they should. While the Treaty may have taken seven years to draft and write up, the United Nations still fails to understand that the United States government is composed of at least 51 governments—and more than half disapprove of the ATT.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.