We just want your firearms
At the start of the month, I did some backgrounding of an gunbigot named Lee Gaillard, wherein I pointed to his connection to a group called “The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation“.
Now, in the sentence that followed their intro I called them “gun grabbers”. However, a commenter stopped by on Monday to leave this comment on that post. Her name was Ashley, and she said:
Correction: The Center for Arms Control and Non Proliferation advocates for a reduction in nuclear arms and does not include guns or 2nd amendment issues in their (our) work.
I stand corrected.
However, Ashley, if what you stated is truly what the group stands for, then mayhaps this should not be a picture that rotates through the front page of the organization’s website
Maybe that is not what Ashley stands for, but I believe something entirely different about the “CACNP”.
They’re liars, that’s all.
Heh. They’d be appalled if they knew that I was a student of Kenneth N. Waltz, who came up with a very good theory of international politics and a corollary that we should all be anti-anti-nuclear proliferation.
Has a lot in common with the “more guns, less crime” argument, actually.
I had a SANE/Freeze activist come to my door one day in law school and it was fun to drag out all the old Waltzian arguments to flummox her.
Waltz was very much anti-Iraq War I and II, but he had good reasons consistent with his own theories.
The picture on the front of our website, refers to the attached article about U.S. arms sales to the Middle East. So to correct myself, we do work on small arms, but it’s the international small arms trade. Again, our work has nothing at all to do with 2nd amendment issues.
David, glad to see you have Read Waltz’s famous Adelphi paper for IISS, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better (1981), as well as the seminal Theory of International Politics (which has a permanent spot reserved on my desk). Waltz’s ideas, while interesting, were conceived during the rigid bipolarity of the Cold War and are thus less applicable today. Scott Sagan made the rebuttal to Waltz most forcefully in The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (2002), arguing that nuclear weapons do not prevent human beings from making mistakes but ‘only make their inevitable mistakes more deadly.’ David may want to pin his hopes on abstract theorizing about rational political decision-making, but I suggest we hedge our bets by preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to our potential enemies.
And now we see the difference between your organization’s views and mine (and most likely those of what I would hope would be the RNS readership): That the 2nd Amendment is not just an American right, but is a natural human right of every person on the planet.
What you/they call “small arms trade†what I would more often than not call the arming of people for their own defense.
Do a large number of those firearms end up in the hands of soldiers/enforcers who “work†under dictators and warlords? Surely. But if those who stand against the worldwide trade of small arms were to look at the facts, they would find that if they were to get out of the way, more civilians would be armed as well, and then they’d be able to defend themselves against said dictators.
It is the restriction willed upon these people from groups such as yours that keeps defensive arms out of the hands of those who are currently having genocide waged against them in places such as Kenya and the Sudan.
Would people still be being killed, again, surely. But they wouldn’t be getting rounded up and killed in numbers so astronomical that it is sickening. The dictators and warlords would find their prey more difficult to exterminate and their followers and/or fellow tribesmen would be less willing to commit the dirty deeds if they knew that they actually stood a good chance of being killed by these armed civilians defending themselves and their families.
It is a fact of life around the world that easy prey is taken before difficult prey. Letting farmers in Kenya have the key to their own defense is more likely to save their life than your NGO complaining about the “small arms trade” or the UN standing around in the general vicinity.
I think that since the organization started out as a non-nuclear weapons outfit and then branched out into chemical and biological weapons and missile systems and then into international small arms trade is an extremely clear indication of the direction they are taking.
Even if they have no agenda against guns (and I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments about there being a god-given right to self defense that far transcends the 2nd Amendment) at this time, they will in time.
It is telling to me that the first statement about the outfit not being anti-gun only says they are anti-nuclear weapons, when their own web site strongly promotes their anti-WMD of any type position. It sounded to me like someone trying to just brush the issue aside with an exaggeration.