One of the things that drives me crazy about hippies is that they will believe just about anything, so long as it is presented as being an alternative to “western medicine” and the powers that be. I remember one guy trying to tell me that by touching this quartz crystal that he had “charged”, he was removing the aluminum that had accumulated in my brain and would later give me Alzheimer’s. Never mind the various conservation laws violated in this little bit of teleportation (or the fact that I may not have any aluminum in my brain at all), it wasn’t a pill from big pharma, so it had to be good*. He then proceeded to hand out DHEA supplements to a number of females of child bearing age, a dangerous thing to do given that DHEA is a steroid hormone that is converted to both estrogen and testosterone in the body and can cause young women to stop menstruating. It can also cause the growth of excess body hair, but this guy didn’t care, he liked hairy women and anything that real doctors said he shouldn’t use because it was dangerous. Such MD’s you see, were part of the “cover up.”
You couldn’t find a group less similar in appearance or lifestyle** to hippies than the conservatives of Guns&Patriots, but they share common ground in oppositional reasoning. Conservatives obsessed with the guns will believe anything you tell them, so long as it involves someone coming to take their guns away.
Take this new column by Jennifer Kendall, entitled Understanding the United Nations and US Gun Control. This article discusses the potential United Nations Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) treaty, a treaty that has not even been drafted. The main idea behind such a treaty, were it to be drawn up, would be to require all arms manufactures to create a sort of “watermark” with a serial number, on all new small arms that are manufactured. The reasoning behind this is to help stem the flow of illegally manufactured weapons into the hands of powerful drug cartels and terrorist groups such as Al Qaida, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Al Shabaab in Somalia. This way, it would be easy for governments to quickly seize international shipments of weapons that did not have the appropriate markings.
Now, whether or not creating a unique marking on new weapons would actually lead to better control of the illegal arms market is up for debate (exactly how difficult would it be to counterfeit this things anyway?), but conservatives are not worried about it’s effectiveness in fighting terror. In fact, they believe it’s true target is American citizens and their pistols, rifles and shotguns.
“The U.N. program of action concerning SALW includes restrictions on the manufacturing, storing, transferring and possession of firearms and ammunition if it is not adequately marked. It ensures that once SALW’s program is enacted all licensed manufacturers must apply a unique marking identifying the country of manufacture, manufacturer and serial number of the weapon. Weapons that lack this unique marking that are confiscated, seized or collected will be destroyed. These restrictions will be enforced on a national, regional and global scale.
“Once the treaty is signed, if you happen to own a gun that was manufactured without this ‘unique marking,’ you are in violation of the law and must turn over your weapon to authorities. This includes guns that were obtained legally. With gun laws in the U.S. that already place many restrictions on the sale of personal firearms, the adoption of this treaty would further infringe on the Second Amendment of the Constitution. When the founding fathers of the U.S wrote that, ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,’ they made no mention of unique markings.
Yes, the U.N and the men in the black helicopters are coming for your guns! Get ready to fight from the bed to the closet! Really, you would think that since they hate the democratically elected government so much, that these folks would be itching for a gun confiscation raid so that they could over throw their African overlord.
In any case, there is no “treaty” yet and owning a currently legal firearm would never make you subject to seizures under such a treaty. There’s two reasons for this. The first is that there is a constitutional prohibition against congress passing ex post facto laws that would surely hold up in court. That is, barring a change to the 2nd amendment itself, you will not be able to turn every gun that is currently owned legally into contraband, because it’s sale was completed prior to any new treaty being ratified. The second reason is that the 2nd amendment still trumps any treaty that the United States may enter (treaties do become “the supreme law of the land”, but cannot negate an existing constitutional right or power. See Reid v. Covert, 1957). In order to confiscate legally purchased weapons from U.S. citizens, the supreme court would have to change it’s interpretation of the 2nd amendment, or a new constitutional amendment that replaced the 2nd amendment would have to be passed. Given the recent Supreme Court case of McDonald v. Chicago, it seems unlikely that the Supreme court is going to soften the rights granted by the 2nd amendment anytime soon and there’s no way anyone is suggesting a firearm banning amendment anytime soon.
Conservatives, don’t believe everything that you read. Is the U.N. coming to take your guns? Sure. And I have a magic crystal that will remove heavy metals from your colon if you stare at it and think of Ronald Reagan. Stupid hippies.
*Another thing about hippies-for being so anti pharmaceuticals, they sure do like to pop adderall, Valium and vicodin. I’m sure they have a good reason for it.
**Despite the maddening disconnection from science, hippies are a lot more fun to hang out with the gun-obsessed wackos. The best people to hang with of course, are gun obsessed hippie wackos. Paging Doctor Gonzo.