Even Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly isn't buying National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre's outrageous claims that a yet to be finalized United Nations treaty to regulate the import and export of small arms worldwide will strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights and cause American citizens “to be added to that pile of dead people left defenseless by the [United Nations'] policies.”
The NRA has repeatedly offered such false and conspiratorial claims in response to the treaty, claims which in the past have been echoed on Fox. But during today's interview, Kelly repeatedly pushed back on LaPierre's talking points.
After LaPierre made the false claim that the proposed treaty “says to people in the United States turn over your personal protection and your firearms to the government,” Kelly attempted to steer him back to reality by suggesting the treaty is about “global arms sales” not “domestic sales.” On multiple occasions she urged him to justify his baseless claims.
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LAPIERRE: The fact is the UN doesn't protect people, it doesn't save the innocent. You could stack to the ceiling the bodies of the innocent a thousand times over that the UN has failed to protect. The dead people don't get to vote on this UN treaty. And Americans don't want to be added to that pile of dead people left defenseless by the UN policies.
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LAPIERRE: The UN gun control plan is the most extreme imaginable. It says to people in the United States turn over your personal protection and your firearms to the government, and the government will protect you.
KELLY: It does? Because the President, the administration has said we support this but it doesn't infringe on our Second Amendment rights here. As a practical matter you tell us, to gun owners watching this program right now, what would it mean for them?
LAPIERRE: Right now it would affect every handgun, rifle and shotgun American citizens own.
KELLY: How?
LAPIERRE: It's the most extreme imaginable-- It sets up global agencies, data centers, tracking, monitoring, surveillance, supervision, it institutionalizes the whole UN gun plan within the bureaucracy of the United Nations with a permanent funding mechanism. And included in this gun plan is implementation legislation that they are going to press for the United States to adopt.
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KELLY: When they talk about promoting this this talk about how this is about the global arm sales and if anything they will just be regulating the weapons manufacturers here in the United States to be more open and transparent about whom they are selling outside of the country, not so much domestic sales.
LAPIERRE: They may say that. It's simply not the case. They have consistently refused to exempt rifles, shotguns, handguns owned by American citizens. They won't even exempt sporting firearms. The fact is this effects every single firearm.
Kelly is correct. The stated goal of the small arms treaty is to regulate the import and export of firearms between nations. In fact the U.N. General Assembly's resolution on the treaty makes clear that countries will “exclusively” maintain the right within their borders to “regulate internal transfers of arms and national ownership, including through national constitutional protections on private ownerships.”
According to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States' interest in the treaty is to essentially implement import and export rules already in place in the United States on an international scale. This would hardly be the onerous intrusion into gun rights that LaPierre suggests and makes his claim that the treaty poses a threat to individual gun owners in the United States absurd.