For the past two weeks, I’ve been attending the Third U.N. Conference to Review Progress Made in the Implementation of the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects — mercifully abbreviated as RevCon 3 for the PoA.

In theory, the purpose of the PoA — which is a political instrument, not a treaty — is to encourage cooperation on the illicit international trade in small arms. If the PoA stuck to this, it might be modestly useful. It can only be modestly useful because far too many nations at the U.N. don’t right now have the ability, or the desire, to do the basic things they have repeatedly committed to do.

Unfortunately, the PoA doesn’t stick to the illicit international trade in small arms. And in the process of not allowing it to stick to its job, its supporters say a lot of stupid things. And yes, they do like to talk about gun control. Here are the ten dumbest things I’ve heard about guns at the United Nations over the past two weeks.

1. Mexico’s proposal to include IEDs. Make no mistake, IEDs are a problem. But they’re not one the PoA can usefully address. Many types of IED are already illegal. Many of them are not trafficked internationally. And above all, they’re used almost exclusively by terrorists. Putting IEDs into the PoA amounts to implying that Al Qaeda should sign up to it. The Law Frederic Bastiat Best Price: $3.00 Buy New $3.79 (as of 05:35 UTC - Details)
2. Europe’s invention of new kinds of guns. You’d think there would be just two kinds of guns: ones that can fire, and ones that can’t. If you want to make a gun that can fire into one that can’t, use a torch to cut the frame (or receiver) in half. Not so, according to Europe, which for some reason doesn’t like to cut guns in half. As a result, it doesn’t have a reliable way to deactivate guns, and so now recognizes five different kinds of guns: manufactured, downgraded, converted, deactivated, and reactivated firearms. And of course, it wants new rules for all of these, with numbers put in all the parts of every firearm. In theory, this will prevent terrorist attacks like the one in Paris in 2015, which used weapons that were supposedly deactivated. In practice, it will just create confusion. The simplest thing to do is to define and number a gun by its frame (or receiver), state that the way to deactivate a gun is to cut it in half, and move on.
3. The worship of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. The Goals, known as the SDGs, are a tedious laundry list of 169 separate targets, most of which are in reality merely pious aspirations or politicized goals. One of these targets is “by 2030 [to] significantly reduce illicit financial and arms flows.” The PoA isn’t likely to make a major contribution to this target, but the fact that the target mentions illicit arms flows has become an excuse on the part of the Europeans and the Africans to lard the PoA with loads of references to the SDGs. The point of this is to turn the PoA into a human rights and development agreement, and, by the by, to transform it into politicized mush with no relevance to actually reducing the illicit arms trade.
4. Mexico’s proposal to regulate “the end user.” For years, Mexico has argued that the PoA shouldn’t simply concern itself with the international illicit arms trade, but should reach inside national borders and regulate “end users.” In the U.S., that means individual purchasers of firearms, which is precisely why Mexico wants what it wants: it’s trying to use the PoA to mandate gun control in the U.S. Mexico’s proposal is part of the PoA’s curious tendency to forget that it’s supposed to be focusing solely on the international trade, and to wade off into regulating the “end user.” The highlight of this tendency is the proposal, made in 2016 by the U.N. Secretary-General and included in a PoA draft this year, to use RFID chips to “track and document which individual has used a specific weapon, when and for how long.”
5. The demand to include ammunition. A lot of countries want the PoA to include ammunition. Right now, it doesn’t, and there’s a good reason for this: guns are durable, relatively easy to mark and trace, and don’t work without ammunition, whereas ammunition is consumable and is produced in enormous quantities that are impossibly burdensome to trace. The number of delegations here that can’t grasp this simple point is incredible. For the sake of the political thrill of including ammunition, they want to add an unworkable commitment to the PoA when most of the nations in the room aren’t fulfilling the much simpler ones they’ve failed to uphold for the past 17 years.

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