Some Americans are skeptical that there are foreign threats to our individual constitutional rights. Today we are faced with just such a threat from the UN small arms treaty known as the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which could potentially impact our right to keep and bear arms, as provided in the US constitution’s Bill of Rights as the 2nd Amendment.

It is well-known that the political Left in America for the most part does not believe in the right to keep and bear arms and regards the 2nd Amendment as superfluous and expendable. Leftist forces have been working for decades to curtail private firearm ownership in the US through gun control laws, regulation and executive orders.

Now, the American Left has turned to transnationalism. Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as prominent Left-leaning individuals, have become increasingly frustrated over the years with their inability to advance radical agendas under U.S. constitutional law. As a result, they have created a parallel channel through which they promote the concept of the American judicial community looking to international and foreign law in making legal decisions and establishing legal precedents.

This dangerous phenomenon is known as “transnational jurisprudence,” or more succinctly, “transnationalism.”

The radical Left want to use international treaties brewed up by tin-pot dictators, outright enemies of America and foreign voting blocs such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation as a backdoor method to chip away and erode Americans’ 2nd Amendment rights.

Assurances by ultra-leftist politicians like President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the UN small arms treaty isn’t a threat to our constitutional right to keep and bear arms ring hollow in light of the prevarications associated with Operation Fast and Furious and the administration’s close ties and support for the granddaddy of Jihadist terrorist organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt and Libya. Frankly, the American people simply cannot trust this administration when it comes to their fundamental constitutional rights.

The original revelation–along with those hollow assurances–that the Obama administration was shifting American policy on the UN small arms treaty came early on in this regime, way back in October of 2009.

And in June of 2011, Forbes magazine published a critique of this treaty, which Hillary Clinton is set to sign very soon.

Certain aspects of the UN small arms treaty are worth pointing out here. This UN treaty will almost certainly force the U.S. to:

• Enact tougher licensing requirements, creating additional bureaucratic red tape for legal firearms ownership.
• Confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized” civilian firearms (exempting those owned by our government of course).
• Ban the trade, sale and private ownership of all semi-automatic weapons (any that have magazines even though they still operate in the same one trigger pull – one single “bang” manner as revolvers, a simple fact the ant-gun media never seem to grasp).
• Create an international gun registry, clearly setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation.
• In short, overriding our national sovereignty, and in the process, providing license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.
• The ATT will set up a global body which will require all nations to regulate firearms so that they can prevent their exportation to other countries. Inevitably, this will require countries to inventory the guns in private hands and to register them.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, yesterday brought us yet another revolting revelation when it comes to the UN ATT: the Islamic Republic of Iran has been named to the UN bureau overseeing the upcoming conference on the treaty.

Just as a reminder here are some highlights from Iran’s CV:

• Iran is the world’s most active state sponsor of Jihadist terrorism.
• Iran has provided sponsorship, support and/or safe haven for the world’s three deadliest Jihadist terrorist organizations: Al Qaeda, HAMAS and Hezbollah. In fact, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps brokered a training agreement between Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, which enabled Al Qaeda to carry out deadly attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
• Iran has been waging a proxy war against America for over a generation. Iran-backed Hezbollah killed 241 US servicemen on October 23rd 1983 in the infamous Islamikaze attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. According the former FBI director Louis Freeh, the Iranian government was involved in the attack on the US Air Force Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in June 1996. 19 American servicemen lost their lives in that attack. Iran actively supported and armed insurgents fighting US forces in Iraq and Taliban jihadists fighting US forces in Afghanistan.
• Iran is a brutal theocracy ruled by Shariah law in which human rights are routinely violated.
• Perhaps most ironically, Iran has a nuclear weapons program in which it is enriching uranium in direct violation of international treaties to which it is a party!

This is the nation tasked with overseeing the treaty that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton plan on signing and sending to the US Senate for ratification. And make no mistake, even if the US Senate does not ratify the ATT, should Obama be re-elected, we can be sure that he will do everything in his power to implement as much of its components as possible through executive order and federal regulation.

Dick Morris has set up an online petition for opponents of the UN small arms grab to sign to send a message to our elected leaders in Washington.

Finally, there is an organization that has taken a leadership role in protecting American constitutional rights from transnational subversive and hostile foreign influences: the American Public Policy Alliance. Learn more about their efforts against this threat at their web site here.

Christopher Holton is Vice President for Outreach with the Center for Security Policy