Is the UN coming for your guns?

If you are reading this column, it means our civilization has probably not completely collapsed just yet.  But based on what I’ve been hearing from many of the people around me since the country reelected a certain liberal Democrat for another four years in the White House, such a collapse is surely imminent.

President Obama held back on his plot to turn us into a socialist collective during his first term, the thinking seems to go, but now that he doesn’t have to face reelection he is sure to unleash his full left-wing agenda on us.  Brace yourself!

I’m not sure exactly what all is supposed to be involved in this liberal re-making of America, but one frightening story making my email account light up lately involves an insidious plot to round up and collect all of our privately owned firearms.  And they are going to do it through the United Nations.  You know nothing good ever comes out of the UN.

It seems there’s this treaty that Hilary Clinton has been trying to get passed at the UN.  (Yes, Hilary Clinton AND the UN are involved in this, so you know it’s going to be very, very bad.)  It’s called the Arms Trade Treaty and according to the alarmist newswire service I am apparently subscribed to it will provide Obama with a “legal way around the 2nd Amendment” and will lead to a “complete ban and confiscation of all firearms.”

It’s one of the silliest things I’ve seen in my Inbox in a very long time, and let me tell you a lot of silly things show up in my Inbox.  (I know a lot of weird people.)  The goal of this treaty, which has not been completed or ratified by anyone as yet, is actually to generate an enforceable standard for importing and exporting conventional weapons between countries.  There is language within the treaty affirming the rights of individual nations to regulate the sale of conventional weapons within their own countries according to their own laws and constitutions.

But even if they were to change the wording to try and impinge on our gun-owning rights, the treaty (like any treaty we sign onto) would have to be passed by two-thirds of the US Senate before it could become legally binding, and I suspect that if it was designed to strip away our rights to own firearms there would at least be a bit of discussion about that before it passed the Senate.

And then there’s the fact that treaties with other countries don’t have the legal standing to override our Constitution, so if Obama wanted to round up every privately owned firearm in the US he’d have to wipe out or have the Supreme Court significantly reinterpret the Second Amendment, which makes the whole UN treaty approach seem like a huge waste of time.

Setting aside all of that, how realistic do you think it would be for the federal government to completely disarm the population?  We are saturated with guns of every size, weight, and caliber, and a well-maintained gun can just about last forever.  How on earth would they find them all?  How many people would it take to go out and get them?  How many federal agents would get killed in the process?  And how many federal agents would refuse to even carry out such an outlandish directive?

Please allow me to set your mind at ease about this.  We have a lot of things to worry about, and I’m not optimistic about four more years of Obama, but I promise you there is no secret UN treaty that is going to give the federal government the right to kick down your door and take away all your guns.  They don’t have the legal standing for it and frankly it’s not even logistically feasible.

So please don’t forward any more emails to me about this unless the UN formally assumes control over all the world’s governments, which according to some other emails I’ve received is going to happen any day now.

Passing the baton

I’m still feeling a little down about the election results from last week.  I didn’t realize it until after it was all over, but apparently I was one of the big losers this time around.

No, I wasn’t running for office myself.  As an employee of the federal government the law forbids me from competing in partisan elections.  I also think that a fairly large percentage of the human race are morons and feel compelled to point that out fairly often.  That attitude would surely cost me a lot of votes. 

But the news media made it clear when they waxed philosophic after President Obama’s convincing win that there has been a changing of the guard in America and that guys like me are on the wrong side of a major demographic trend.

You see I am white, male, over-40, and more often than not vote for Republicans over Democrats.  Apparently I have been part of an exclusive ruling class all my life and never even realized it until me and my cronies lost our grip on power this election.  All these years I thought people didn’t like me because of my looks and personality, but maybe everyone was just jealous because of all the power and influence I commanded.

I am glad, at least, that someone was happy on November 7.  If you are non-Caucasian, female, a child of illegal immigrants, someone who pays no taxes, a gay person who wants to get married, or a recreational marijuana user then I congratulate you on your success in 2012.  On behalf of all the conservative old white dudes, I officially concede the mantle of power to the new majority.

To be honest, the election results didn’t bother me all that much.  I gave Romney my tepid support because I thought he was more likely to address the one issue that for me dwarfs all others – the federal government’s completely out-of-control spending habits – than the man who had done nothing about it for the last four years. 

But did I trust Romney, or the Republicans in Congress, to decisively correct the course of our financial ship?  Not really.  After 8 years of watching George W. Bush and a Republican-dominated congress ratchet up our national debt to unheard-of levels I don’t have any faith left that either party has the backbone to make the hard, unpopular choices that need to be made to put us back on solid footing.

As I watched Democrats high-five each other in celebration on Wednesday and listened to Republicans sulk over the fact that the country has been taken over by deadbeats, it seemed like I was watching a football game where the people in the stands didn’t seem to realize that a hurricane was bearing down on the stadium about to wipe them all out.  A few of us have tried to point out that once we reach a point of no return we are all going to go down together, but most of America seems to be too caught up in the game to care.

And I’m tired of being a voice crying out in the wilderness.  Only the birds and squirrels can hear me, and they are getting annoyed.  This will be the last column I will write that addresses our national debt.  I think at this point it is a lost cause.

I believe we’ve passed the point of no return and we will eventually have to default on our debt.  And then things are going to get really interesting, and not in a good way.  We can only hope that the Chinese will be kind to us when we have to negotiate the terms of our financial surrender.

But for now, let’s not worry about it.  Let’s check in with the latest on the David Petraeus sex scandal, because that’s a lot more fun to talk about, isn’t it?