Published on Sunday, March 26, 2000 in the Washington Post Jesse Helms & The NRA Take Their Version Of The Second Amendment Global by Kathi Austin Seventeen months ago, in the aftermath of gory civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia and conflicts in neighboring countries that had left more than 250,000 people dead, the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) decided to try something unprecedented: It announced a three-year moratorium in all 16 member nations on the export, import and manufacture of small arms. Since most of the guns came from outside the region--and because ECOWAS had insufficient money and technical expertise to implement a ban--the West Africans appealed to the international community for help. The United States was among the governments that agreed to contribute, pledging $200,000 toward the moratorium and $1 million more for measures to support conflict resolution. These were modest, even minimal grants. But they didn't get past Sen. Jesse Helms. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a longtime ally of the National Rifle Association, invoked a provision of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act to block the funding. In an Aug. 24, 1999, letter to the U.S. Agency for International Development, Helms explained his opposition: "The Small-Arms Moratorium project proposes using U.S. taxpayers' money (among other things) to lobby or promote policies in foreign countries that may very well be a violation of the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution--if the federal government attempted such activities here at home." The proposed aid, Helms wrote, was "nothing less than a brazen international expansion of the President and Vice President's domestic gun control agenda." I've been documenting conflict in Africa firsthand for 12 years, and it's not clear to me what the Second Amendment has to do with blood-soaked Sierra Leone. What does seem clear is that blocking support to ECOWAS was a warning shot in the American gun lobby's plans to go global. The NRA, its allies and affiliates are campaigning against what they describe as a worldwide conspiracy of gun snatchers. The immediate goal appears to be frightening American gun owners, thereby raising money and membership at home. But there is a broader result: thwarting international attempts to contain the spread and misuse of small arms. The most sensational atrocities in the West African wars may have been amputations, carried out with machetes and knives. But the bulk of the killings were committed with rifles, machine guns and semiautomatics--far more efficient instruments of death. There are about 500 million of these cheap, durable and readily available small arms circulating in the world today. Most of them are manufactured in the United States, Europe, Russia or China, and many are initially purchased legally. Over the past few years, I have seen a growing awareness in international circles of the fact that it is far too easy to transfer such arms illicitly from one country to another--and from one small, ugly war to another. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has recently made three powerful speeches on the subject. In various regional and multinational forums, governments have begun trying to take steps to regulate the small arms trade. Notably, U.N. members are drafting a firearms protocol to supplement the convention against "transnational organized crime," and preparations are being made for an international conference on illicit small-arms trafficking next year. These efforts are being countered by America's ever-vigilant gun lobby--particularly, but not always openly, by the NRA, which in one of its anti-U.N. ads warns of "shooters and sportsmen, collectors and businessmen, sacrificed on the altar of politics . . . ." The State Department actually consulted with NRA representatives about its $200,000 contribution toward the West Africa moratorium. But the NRA's participation in those talks was little more than a smoke screen: Its ally, the big-game hunters' group Safari Club International, actively attacked the moratorium because it might interfere with its members' sport. Off the record, an NRA lobbyist told one of my colleagues that his group was worried that such policy initiatives would have "inadvertent effects on hunters and sport shooters." But, my colleague said, who would want to go hunting in West Africa? The "big five" African trophies (lion, elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, leopard) are found primarily further east, particularly in Tanzania and Kenya. "There is not a lot of hunting in Western Africa," the lobbyist agreed, then added without irony: "But it may open up." That seems highly unlikely during the three-year span of the ECOWAS moratorium. In any case, it is appalling to think that the entertainment of a few big-spending sportsmen should supersede the concerns of countries that have witnessed bloodshed on a scale most Americans can barely imagine. But that, apparently, is the gun lobby's continuing goal. In the same letter in which he rejected the ECOWAS grant, Helms asked the USAID inspector general to take a close look at all U.S.-supported programs aimed at preventing and addressing the consequences of conflict in Africa. The State Department officials I have spoken to interpret this move as a threat to any future attempts to restrict the flow of arms. Despite its name, the NRA has long engaged in international activism. Besides subsidizing sport shooters associations and gun clubs abroad, it contributes money to pro-gun political candidates as far away as Australia and New Zealand, and has conducted public campaigns against attempts at gun regulation in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and elsewhere. It also helped found such proxy groups as the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities--headquartered in Brussels--with which it shares board members and lobbyists. At the U.N., these allies bog down attempts to control the illicit gun trade by attempting to confine the debate to small technical fixes such as the marking of guns at manufacture. Meanwhile, the NRA recently produced a series of television infomercials accusing the United Nations of a global "gun confiscation" campaign. As the words "United Nations 'Cleansing' Globe Of Gun Rights" move across the screen, one spot--already being broadcast-- begins with NRA President Charlton Heston intoning, "If you follow politics at all, you know a lot of people in Washington, D.C., want to take away your right to keep and bear arms. The truth is they have the whole world on their side, because the systematic disarming of a free people is happening across the globe today." He continues, "From around the world, the message is clear--your guns are next. Only one thing stands in their way, the Second Amendment and the NRA." Later in the same ad, the group's executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre--the one who has been sparring with Clinton--warns that "at the United Nations and around the world, the movement against your gun rights is gaining money and momentum fast. Their target is the United States. Their objectives are international gun registration, global gun confiscation, and an end to your right to keep and bear arms." All the players in the gun lobby can be expected to be on hand next year for the U.N. conference on illicit arms trafficking (date and site yet to be determined). During the Cold War, most small arms tended to be sold and transferred by governments; today most of the traffickers are private. Patchy legal controls and ineffective international oversight means that they go almost unregulated: While more than 80,000 Rwandans, for example, have at some time been jailed for allegedly participating in that country's 1994 genocide, no charges have been brought--or even realistically considered--against those who armed the perpetrators, even though they violated an international arms embargo. At one of the preparatory meetings for the conference--a joint briefing by U.N. delegations, U.N. officials and nongovernmental associations--one of my colleagues heard the ambassador from Sierra Leone describe how war had devastated his country. Then she listened, astounded, as a chief NRA lobbyist, Tom Mason, rebuked the ambassador for advocating stringent oversight of the flow of arms. Other participants were equally flabbergasted; at meetings over the next several days, participants shook their heads over the audacity of an American gun lobbyist advocating more guns, not fewer, to a country desperately seeking peace. Unregulated small arms are a serious problem. The illicit trafficking of guns fuels conflict, destabilizes entire regions, threatens U.S. peacekeepers abroad, squanders U.S. money needed for aid and development, and encourages extremists. Some governments are trying to do something about it. It would be tragic if their efforts were stymied by illegal arms sellers, safari hunters and anti-U.N. conspiracy theorists. Kathi Austin is the director of the arms and conflict program of the Fund for Peace, a nonprofit organization based in Washington and San Francisco. Loretta Bondi, the program's advocacy director, helped prepare this article.