Gun-Owners Afraid of UN “Conspiracy”

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This would all be quite humorous—

Americans mistakenly worried the United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4—U.S. Independence Day—are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.

except for the fact that the NRA tends, quite often, to stoke and inflame conservative fears that the UN really is plotting to erect some sinister world government or other that will take away all our guns. And the fact that the NRA then uses those fears to generate backing for its opposition to sensible regulations on the global light-arms trade, which is one of the major health crises of our time. And people die as a result. So I don’t know how “funny” I find it that we have a lot of gun-toting morons in this country.

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