The United Nations and Military Small Arms

Conservatives (specifically, Republicans) are always catastrophizing about how the United Nations is coming for their guns, and liberals (i.e., Democrats) laugh it off as the ravings of crazy people. The truth is somewhere in between and speaks to international capital’s disrespect for national sovereignty, individual freedom, and democracy.

Consider this short, but very dense statement that begins a short essay on the UN’s position on military small arms by Raymond O. Wolfe (Permanent Representative of Jamaica to the United Nations):

The proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW) in various parts of the globe continues to pose a systemic and pervasive threat to the long-term social and economic development of many nations, particularly in small developing states.

It’s going to take several paragraphs to explain what that single sentence means.

First off, what are “small arms and light weapons” (SALW)? Small arms refer to firearms that can be deployed, transported, and hidden by a single person; these would be the guns that our courts say are covered by the Second Amendment. Light weapons expands on that to include the kinds of firearms that must be mounted on a vehicle (typically called a “technical” and usually a Toyota pickup), but still don’t require a lot of people to support, and can easily be hidden. Basically, SALW are effective civilian militia weapons, and the UN wants to eliminate all of them.

Next, it is clear that SALW can extend a period of chaos and death (war) in a nation and prevent the establishment and maintenance of order. The order that the UN is concerned about is described as “social and economic development” and they specify that the scope of their concern is primarily “small developing states”. A “small developing state” is basically an impoverished country with little power. A state is generally impoverished and powerless because it was the victim of colonization; it has been disrupted and severely damaged by European interference. The UN’s solution to the damage caused by colonizers is more colonizing in the form of “development” which is code for getting a nation onboard with worldwide capitalism via the banking industry, and specifically things like the World Bank; I’m linking to their website which paints them as heroes fighting against poverty, which is not accurate at all. Rather, the World Bank is part of a system that capitalists use to keep weak nations poor, so their resources and labor will be cheap and accessible.

To summarize, the UN wants to allow the global banking industry to further colonize powerless, impoverished nations, but people are there running around with military small arms breaking stuff (and people) which prevents this from happening. The UN wants to remove all the military small arms so that these poor nations can be more effectively dominated by bankers.

Certainly, both good people and evil people agree that the death and destruction of these conflicts is bad, but good people are not too keen on the solution being that the people of whatever nation give up their guns and allow themselves to be more fully victimized by global capitalism. Good people want the victimized country to be free to use its own resources more democratically without becoming beholden to bankers. Bad people want the people to surrender to one of the empires trying to conquer that nation.

To be clear, it isn’t always about democracy vs. capitalism in these conflicts. More often than not, there are at least three players from this list: democracy (e.g., YPG, YPJ), global capitalism (e.g., the US, Britain), Islamic theocracy (e.g., Iran), monarchy (e.g., the House of Saud), post-Soviet kleptocracy (e.g., Russia), and genocidal fascists. Per usual, a side might claim a label that doesn’t really fit its ideology and might be a member of more than one category, and often, democracy isn’t really even one of the available options. What’s clear, though, is that when the people are disarmed, democracy is no longer an option.

How does this apply to the United States? Well, the UN would certainly prefer that there were no SALW in the US, but since the US is already fully controlled by capitalism and does not currently have a conflict going on that disrupts capitalism, the US is absolutely not something that the UN is interested in taking action on. Really, the UN works for the US government, not the other way around (and the US government works for global capitalism).

Moreover, US conservatives absolutely support disarming the population of other countries if that will result in the American empire being able to dominate those countries more effectively; they call citizens of other countries who are defending their homes against our invading army “terrorists” and actively advocate for them to be snuffed out. They are completely in favor of international capitalism/banking dominating another country as long as an American flag is somehow involved. Like most of the fears of conservatives, they are projecting; they are irrationally fearful that someone else might treat them the way they treat people.

Basically, both liberals and conservatives are wrong on this point.

The UN does want to take away every citizen’s guns, but there is also no specific danger to gun owners in the United States. The only way the UN could somehow become a threat to US citizens is if the US empire first fell, which would probably mean that the US government had collapsed. The most likely cause of the US government collapsing at this point in time would be far-right militias (i.e., armed conservatives) using small arms to destabilize the country. Then, another country would have to get control of that global empire, wrangle the UN, and use it to try to disarm civilians in this hypothetically war-torn North America. Even then, what’s more likely is that the UN would just become more irrelevant than it already is.

That brings me to my next point: The UN is largely irrelevant. It cannot function to disarm the people of even the smallest, weakest nation. There is absolutely no way it would be able to disarm the people of the United States without the help of the US military, and if the US military were trying to disarm US citizens, it wouldn’t bother to wear blue helmets while it did that.

Finally, let’s all acknowledge that the UN’s fixation on military small arms and the fact that it hasn’t been able to disarm anyone really emphasizes that when people are armed they do have power — for better or for worse. The liberal claim that there’s no point being armed in the face of government violence is patently false. Not only is the UN unable to end civilian ownership of small arms, but the US military isn’t able to, either. If the US military can’t easily stop people in a foreign country who are armed, then how can we expect them to effectively disarm people in the US where they would have to refrain from destroying whole cities with bombs?