Gunning For the World By David Morton
Once just a club for red-blooded American gun owners, the National Rifle Association has become a savvy global lobby. It presses for gun rights at the United Nations. It assists pro-gun campaigns from Sydney to São Paulo. And it has found that its messageloving freedom means loving gunstranslates into almost every language.
The ad starts with a sober, simulated news report. A news anchor, looking directly into the camera, warns viewers about Brazils proposed gun ban. People are misrepresenting the disarmament issue, she says. It wont disarm criminals. The anchor fades and a news-on-the-march montage begins, highlighting freedoms red-letter days. Nelson Mandela is released from prison. A single man impedes a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall falls. Your rights are at risk, says the anchor, returning after the inspiring film clips. Dont lose your grip on liberty. And then, to bring the message home, archival footage runs of thousands of Brazilians taking to the streets, restoring popular rule after more than two decades of dictatorship.
The ad was the first in a series that aired on Brazilian prime-time television last October, when both sides of the countrys gun control debate engaged in a heated exchange about the future of gun laws in South Americas largest democracy. Proponents of the gun ban proposed outlawing the commercial sale of arms and ammunition to civilians, capping a series of controls enacted in recent years. Unless you were a police officer, a soldier, or a private security guard, you wouldnt be allowed to acquire a gun or the bullets to fire one. The idea was promoted by nongovernmental organizations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, adopted by two presidential administrations, and then delayed for years due to the lobbying efforts of Brazils arms manufacturers. Finally, it was to come to a vote, the first time any country held a popular referendum on gun laws.
But Brazils gun poll was never just about Brazil. Brazil was merely the most recent battleground state in a raging global debate over gun rights. A week before the vote, the London-based International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), which represents more than 500 gun control organizations worldwide, coordinated an international day of support for the Brazilian ban. Demonstrations took place in Britain, Italy, South Africa, and Turkey, among other countries. Passage of the ban, IANSA said, would reinforce the movement in favor of gun control in other Latin American countries riddled with armed violence, and back the efforts to control private gun ownership at [an] international level.
Polling numbers heading into the last month of the campaign gave gun control advocates every reason to be optimistic. As late as mid-September, support for the proposed ban was running at 73 percent, thanks in part to the backing of the federal government, the Roman Catholic Church, and Globo TV, a large media conglomerate. Yet, when Brazilians went to the mandatory polls on October 23, they handed the international gun control movement one of its most stinging defeats, rejecting the ban by a margin of nearly 2 to 1. The number of civilians in Brazil who legally own a gun is estimated to be only about 2 million. In other words, some 59 million Brazilians voted to preserve a prerogative the vast majority of them will never enjoy.
Read the rest of the article at:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3329*FW Note:A long article, but worth the read.
Whatever you might think about the NRA, they were very active in the recent vote in Brazil to prevent the people of that nation from losing their right to own a firearm for personal protection.
Always remember that our government believes that our rights can be signed away by treaty, and keep in mind that this was to be a keystone step for the UN to begin disarming ordinary people in the western hemisphere.
The NRA fought that fight
for us, because once the democratic nations in this hemisphere begin falling to the UN small arms disarmament agenda, there will be an increasing pressure for the US to follow suit and buy into that socialist treatise.
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