I was always in favor of gun control, at least until I was a missionary in Africa, when we noticed the criminal gangs/freedom fighters (the groups, as is usual in the third world, overlapped) started attacking missionaries, in cars, in missions, and in hospitals.
They tended to hit places with nuns, because the veils were easier to identify, and unlike the businessmen’s wives, nuns didn’t have security guards or pack an Uzi.

So do I defend guns as a means of self defense? And do I support gun control? Yes, but I’m leery of absolutes.

So when Fred Thompson says the UN is denying the right of self defense when their bureaucrats insist on stringent gun control, it makes me wonder.

Some reporters questioned his data, but Volokh Conspiracy Blog notes:

Sen. Thompson’s letter prompted criticism from Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly and Stephen Benen, both of whom relied on a refutation written by UN Dispatch, a weblog funded by the UN Foundation.

Today, the Knoxville News reports that it was UN Dispatch that got the facts wrong. The Special Rapporteur’s Report which Thompson criticized (and which was adopted and endorsed by a submcommission of the UN Human Rights Council) quite explicitly says that personal self-defense is not a human right….

It’s rather telling that the UN’s American defenders fail to directly address an indisputable fact: U.N. Human Rights Council’s subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has endorsed a report denying the existence of a human right of self-defense, and the subcommission, pursuant to the report, has declared that all national governments are required by international human rights law to implement various gun control provisions–provisions which, by the UN’s standards, make even the gun control laws of New York City and Washington, DC, into violations of international law because they are insufficiently stringent. (See page 14 of the draft BYU article.)

Now, I have two problems with this.

One: Guns can protect people. True, guns in the hands of criminals are a major problem, but confiscating guns may not work: a criminal can get a gun or use a machete to kill, but a gun is an “equilizer” for women and civilians.

Here in the Philippines, after Marcos confiscated guns, everyone in the middle class had a gun or two hidden in their house, to defend against robbers who invade the house.  Yet no one can carry a concealed weapon, which is why every shop and every politician has armed guards sitting outside for protection. Marcos’ law didn’t stop the violence, it merely made the cost of running a business higher, because more security was needed.
But the second problem is more subtle: Who do you want to make your laws? The UN/EU bureaucracy or do you want the power to decide for yourself?

One of the reasons for the US revolution was that laws were being made 3000 miles away, without input or veto by local American opinion.

Right now, the UN has no “army” to insist on their laws, but they can and do influence other countries to pressure countries that don’t go along with their laws.

This is good for Iran, but not so good when the Philippines or countries in  South America are told that they will be denied needed development aid if they refuse to legalize abortion.

That is also why I’m leery about Obama’s painting himself as one who has international ties LINK.

I’m not sure that I want a president who brags he understands foreigners and will be friendly to their point of view. Umm… most Americans came to the US to get away from these countries, where the elites run the place and don’t let the hoi polloi get in their way. That’s why farmer’s sons from San Vincente can end up with PhD grandchildren in San Diego, and blue collar workers children can go to college, and not shunted at age 12 into blue collar jobs as is done in Germany.

And Obama’s embrace of a New World Order of globalization seems to ignore his grandfather’s lessons about raw power taught to him while a student in Indonesia.

Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Lolo, explains the rule of the jungle to the young boy: “Men take advantage of weakness in other men.” ….In America, Obama writes, power was muted; in a place like Indonesia, it was “undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped. . . . That’s how things were; you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them.”

Ah, but that’s the point. In America, we have lots of powers that balance each other…local vs state vs federal vs legislative vs courts….

In a New World Order, one only has to look at the European Union’s all encompassing bureaucracy to see how local laws and customs can be changed without local input into the decision making…and how hard it will be to change that bureaucratic decision.
If elected president, would Obama represent my friends in Hominy OK or Cass Lake MN, or just go along with the opinion makers in the international community of people who want to do good things for everyone?

Just wondering.

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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines. Her website is Finest Kind Clinic and Fishmarket.