It would appear that the last insidious attempt to disarm citizens comes from the EU. However, that is only a partial truth. The EU, or the EC, diligently follows "a recommendation of independent experts", where one hundred percent of these "independent experts" originate from two very reputable non-profit organizations that are so fanatic in their belief in gun bans, that they even want to disarm victims of the Islamic State. In this article we are going to look into them.

In June 2006, the non-profit organization Small Arms Survey, supported by the Swiss and UK government and the UN, pushed for the The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, which cleverly benefited from so called "Development Goals of the UN" and which was endorsed by more than ninety countries of the world. In this declaration, and especially in its explanatory memorandum, it is continuously indicated that arms are the source of all evil in the world. Armed violence prevents societies and economies from developing, armed violence is politically incorrect because it harms the inhabitants of Africa and Near East the most. Armed violence brings more work to politicians, undermines humanitarian aid, causes rape of women and is the reason why countries don't carry out the "Millennium Development Goals" set by the UN within the frame of world improvement:

»The anecdotal experience is clear: armed violence disrupts markets; displaces populations; destroys schools, clinics, and roads; and scars families, communities, and societies. More than 500,000 people die violently every year, most of them in the developing world, and the vast majority as a result of small arms and light weapons. And high levels of armed violence undermine aid effectiveness. «

And so the armed violence directly causes infringement of human rights, which obviously implies that something needs to be done with arms. But beware! Only firearms are meant in this context. Although no firearms were needed when a million people got hacked to pieces with machetes during the Rwandan genocide or when the Hutu systematically mass raped Tutsi women using the AIDS commandos – just the superior numbers of bare hands were sufficient –, that is not something we could dare to think about. The UN even claims that when someone is hacked to bits with machetes, it is really caused firearms, because "the victims were rounded up for the massacre by being threatened with them". Anyone who has seen footage from Rwanda understands this is a demagogy.

Anyway, the Small Arms Survey, an ugly child of the UK anti-gun activists and Swiss "development academicians", needs to show activity, find substitute culprits of violence and fulfill their personal, emotional hatred against firearms. Why? Everyone knows that violence can't be eradicated by bans. And so these activists have removed the word “violence” from the phrase "armed violence", thus making the arms, or more precisely firearms, the only thing remaining to “solve”.

Firearms must be banned! Disarm all civilians! Even if they are defending themselves against the Islamic State, they shouldn't have firearms, because they might hurt someone using them. Let them have their heads cut off as long as there won't be any gunfight! But we will elaborate more on this particular SAS effort later. Meanwhile, let's skip a few years and take a look how the Small Arms Survey actually got into a coalition with the European Commission.

Gun control advocates infiltrate European Commission

As I have already mentioned, the Small Arms Survey issued its Declaration in 2006 – which was not a mere coincidence. It was a time when the UN efforts to introduce an “action plan on the fight against illegal small arms” reached its climax, culminating in the UN conference against illegal arms. Kofi Annan felt the need to reassure the public that it was definitely not about ban of firearms for civilian use; only about the fight against the black market; but as we will see further, he was not to be trusted. As was not Fabio Marini, who made statements that the European Commission does not intend to ban or confiscate legally held firearms, just the illegal ones… Only to personally sign the proposal to ban and confiscate those very same legal firearms a few months later. But let’s deal with one at a time.

The above mentioned conference in 2006 was just an attempt to somehow proceed with the conference of 2001. At the turn of the Millennium, there were some significant developments within the UN. Kofi Annan decided to rebuild the organization and give more room to “do-gooders” and social engineers from various non-profit or non-governmental organizations, since they should know best how the world should be run or look like in the next Millennium. Additionally, according to several officials of the world’s foremost Arms Trade offices and institutes, “conventional arms transfers, except for small arms, were history” – and thus, around the turn of the millennia, all these clerks, activists, researchers and diplomats needed to find (or rather create) a new arms-related “problem” for them to solve, just to preserve their jobs, grants and projects. Hence, in 1998, the “UN Office for Disarmament Affairs“ (UNODA) was established (and provided refuge to various nuclear disarmament experts, that had found their holy grail in SALW in order to keep their jobs and high salaries), while it, in fact, continued in activities started by pro-Soviet “peacemakers” during the Cold War in the West: nuclear disarmament, disarmament of civilians etc. Subsequently, UN resolution 54/54 V was adopted, calling to an action. And later on in 2001, the above mentioned disarmament conference took place. However, it ended up being a total fiasco due to discord between the USA, Russia and China concerning space militarization and missile defence.

The “gun grabbers” were better prepared in 2006, when they focused more on small arms and light weapons to find more unity. However, they did not succeed as no agreement was reached for any of the final statements. Other conferences followed in 2008 and finally 2010, where, also thanks to the Small Arms Survey, the politicians and activists managed to put an equals sign between “violence with weapons” on one hand and world poverty, discrimination, gender inequality, misery and life in poor conditions on the other hand. Finally, in 2014, the “Arms Trade Treaty” was successfully pushed through, despite the fierce opposition of US citizens. Although the UN assured all legal gun owners that the Treaty would virtually have no impact on them as it aims only at the “black market”, NRA proved that it was a lie. The activists indeed managed to include a wide range of civilian firearms in the ATT. Amnesty International even tried to have bolt action rifles and pump-action shotguns included in the ATT scope because of their similarities with military arms. Which means that not even hunters are by any means safe from the activism of gun grabbers.

So far, we have been dealing with UN affairs. But since the anti-gunners got quite annoyed with the process taking over 10 years, they also started focusing, aside from UN, on individual states – and thus shifted their attention and efforts from “global” to “local”. Thus on 19^th December 2012, the EU “Directorate General Home Affairs” (so called DG Home) announced that the recently adopted UN protocols were not sufficient and it was necessary to take matters into their own hands. Under the leadership of EU Commissioner Malmström, the bureau set 3 main goals:

• identify certain types of civilian firearms that should be moved into the category of prohibited firearms
• introduce EU-wide common standards for deactivation of firearms
• strengthen the control over firearms owners

It is quite obvious that when any EU politician reassures the public that the European Commission not trying to ban legal firearms, he lies. Prohibition of “certain types of civilian firearms” is one of the three fundamental and top priority targets and also the reason why the DG Home firearms agenda started in the first place!

European Commission did not waste time and shortly afterwards, in January 2013, set up “Task Force Firearms”. It’s goal? Within a year, issue a communiqué to serve as a guideline for politicians on standards for deactivation of firearms, on measures ensuring possession of firearms only by their legal owner… And on which types of firearms possessed by the EU citizens should newly be prohibited.

On 11^th April 2013, the “Firearms Expert Group” was formed. It consists of nine members of Member State’s law enforcement authorities, two members of associations of European producers of firearms, one member of European Police Office (Europol) and three “experts” from universities, research institutes and non-governmental organizations.

This “expert group” was put together by an un-elected, faceless bureaucrat named Fabio Marini. He has moved through a variety of positions within the DG Home (the oldest official record found reveals his participation in investigation of financial and economical crime) until his appointment as a Head of the Firearms Task Force. Katja Triebel found evidence that Fabio Marini systematically lies in order to get his own way, but that by itself wouldn’t have been such a big deal, as those lies were always quickly refuted. The “Expert Group” represents far bigger problem, as other high ranking politicians take its advice quite seriously.

If we omit police officers, only five members of the “expert group” remain. One of them is a deputy of Belgian arms factory FN Herstal (who is automatically considered as biased lobbyist following aims of his company, despite the fact that FN does not sell a lot of civilian firearms in Europe; its major customers are European and American state agencies, who are often against civilian gun ownership). The next one is the deputy of IEACS organization that speaks for French, Belgian, German, Italian and Spanish manufactures of “sporting and hunting firearms”, defending mainly bolt action rifles and break-open shotguns, who don’t necessarily have to care about semi-automatic firearms that much. However, even this “vote” is considered biased: the EC even claimed that an “alternative” has to be found. With the words of Marini and Malmström:

“We are very keen to capture the views of a wider range of stakeholders – including victims organisations and NGOs – and to provide an alternative perspective to that given to the ENTR questionnaire 2012 where respondents were mainly from the users, retailers and manufacturers of firearms.“

Such “alternative” against these “undesirable” voices had to be found in the form of three “experts from universities, research organizations and non-government sector”. These are automatically regarded as unbiased, objective and credible.

That alone is a rough disproportion; but in fact, it is much worse. Guess who are those three “independent experts”? Yes, you are right.

British citizen Sarah Parker, who is an employee of the Small Arms Survey.

Italian professor Ernesto Savona, who actively draws on materials and opinions of the Small Arms Survey and attends its conferences; in other words, a Small Arms Survey collaborator.

And finally, non-profit organization “Saferworld”, which doesn’t even try to pretend impartiality and instead openly declares banning of firearms as one of its goals.

No wonder the European Commission tries again and again to ban semi-automatic and also other firearms, then – it has been its target ever since 2012. We can expect European Commission pushing this agenda also in the future, unless the fanatical gun control advocates and Fabio Marini, current Head of TF Firearms, get fired. Due to the European Union’s complete lack of democracy, in which the European Commission has a hegemony on power and, together with activists, is the only body with legislative initiative, the European Parliament, representing European citizens and their desires, could therefore only turn down again and again wicked proposals coming from the Commission and the activists. In fact, we are stuck in a “war of attrition”. On one side, there is a small minority of UN connected activists such as Small Arms Survey and Saferworld, who intensively preach to the European Commission of “their truth”. On the other side, there are millions of EU citizens who repeatedly try to rouse the European Parliament from it’s lethargy in order to stop the activists, working through the EC, from passing their proposals.

We need to defend proactively

Whoever gives up in this war of attrition first loses. However, along with reactive defence – that is, waiting for EC to propose a firearm ban and a subsequent frenetic effort to sink it – we can counterattack. The EP and EC are a sort of “proxy-battlefield", just as, during the Cold War, USA and USSR settled their scores in the Middle East. The EU bodies are the ground on which the interests of activists (and their “Trojan horses”) and the interests of the citizens (and “our” MEPs) collide. The only way to victory for us is to expose lies and bias of the originators of the fanatical firearm bans so thoroughly that the European Commission itself would have to fire them.

And since we already know our real enemy, the best strategy is to transfer the battle from the "proxy-battlefield" of European institutions to our enemy’s home ground – just as the activists strive to bring their fight to our homes, sending SWAT teams to execute house searches and expropriate our firearms.

Since we know that the author of the EC efforts to ban guns is the Fabio Marini’s group, formed by “DG Home”, and especially his “gun-ban-crew” from the “Expert Group" and Small Arms Survey, we also know who should be the target of our active counterattack: these activists, considered by the politicians to be "impartial experts", providing them with good advices.

Small Arms Survey should be portrayed for what it really is: extremely biased group, an equivalent of “environmental” pressure NGOs, capable of putting together professional looking papers with a lot of statistics – thus making themselves a good reputation – but only doing so in an extremely manipulative way, as a means of their ultimate goal: complete disarmament of civilians, leaving them at the mercy of criminals and terrorists. Not with bad intentions, but for the sake of an insane “Utopia without weapons”, where gun-bans automatically mean security and where dissenting opinions are not permitted.

According to Small Arms Survey’s logic, if civilians are ever permitted to own any firearms, there would always be a “threat” that these firearms “could” be “misused”. And in the subsequent step, this hypothetical threat is started to be considered a fact, which has already happened, and whose virtual “victims” have to be emotively wept over. We have the evidence of just such method in Small Arms Survey’s own publishing.

Are anti-gun activists collaborators of the ISIS?

In the last of their yearbooks, which are most important for politicians and which are given emotional, heartbreaking titles (such as "Women and Guns ", "Everyday Dangers", "Moving Targets", "Gangs, Groups, and Guns", "Development Denied"), the Kurdish fight against the Islamic State is mentioned - and a rather hostile stance with a raised warning finger is taken on the self-defense of Kurds:

»Despite the threats posed by IS, the supply of arms to the Peshmerga presents clear risks of misuse and diversion.«
~ Small Arms Survey 2015, Chapter 4, Box 4.3

However, we have factual evidence of how these seemingly "innocent hints" in such "unbiased reports" are understood by diplomats. Foreign Policy, one of the world’s elite outlets for politicians, diplomats, academicians and strategists in which they publish their opinions, released an emotive reaction to this very report of the SAS:

»The world is awash with weapons. From Syria and Iraq, to the deserts of the Sahel, to the Nigerian bush, it’s a good time to be a guerrilla fighter — in no small part because it’s so outrageously easy to acquire the kind of weaponry necessary to carry out insurgent warfare. That fact of 21st century life is made clear by the most recent edition of the Small Arms Survey: Weapons and the World.

(…)

Small Arms Survey found that states continue supplying weapons to these countries despite the heightened risk that they could be misused or diverted.

(…)

While the Small Arms Survey advocates for restraint in supplying weapons to these unstable regions, several Western governments have nonetheless provided arms to rebel groups seen as allies against either extremist groups or repressive regimes. Western arms shipments to Kurdish Peshmerga forces, for example, present significant risks both of misuse and that they will end up in the wrong hands. Case in point: When U.S. fighter jets dropped crates of weapons to Kurdish forces besieged in the Syrian city of Kobani, some of the lethal supplies were picked up by the Islamic State.«

Demagogic distortion of the Kobani events is absolutely exemplary. The Kurds were in a totally desperate situation. They were encircled by Islamic State fighters in a city full of refugees and they could not retreat due to Turkey borders behind them, which prevented them from fleeing even if they wanted to. The Kurds went from defeat to defeat on a daily basis, they kept losing territory, they lacked weapons and manpower and the collapse of Kobani's defenses and takeover by the Islamic State was imminent. Had the Kurdish Peshmerga have lost, the ISIS would have slaughtered thousands of people in a barbaric way and dragged women into sexual slavery in order to systematically rape and torture them. Additionally, the ISIS would have consolidated territory by this victory over a strategic city and could have started another, more dangerous offensive and get more fighters coming through Turkey.

To prevent such a sheer disaster, the US, has provided Kurds with a direct air support by B-1 bombers and on 19th October 2014, air-dropped them 28 pallets with weapons and ammunition from a C-130 transport (the Kurds could not be equipped with arms via ground means due to a blockades imposed by Turkey and by ISIS, respectively). The wind blew one of these 28 pallets to a territory which was controlled by the Islamic State, whereas the remaining 27 were safely recovered by the Kurds who, only thanks to this firearms delivery, managed to turn the situation around, stop the Islamic State’s assault and drive them out of Kobani.

Nevertheless, Small Arms Survey implies that the arming of the Kurds to help them defend against the genocide-bent ISIS was somehow “bad”. That the Kobani airdrop, of which 1/28 fell into hands of enemy, was a proof of this “badness of arming the defenders” – although the remaining 96 % of the airdrop helped the Kurds avert barbaric mass murder of thousands of innocent people by islamists and mass rape and torture of women. And this Small Arms Survey report is the reason why media, activists and even politicians subsequently call for an end, or, by SAS's own words, “restriction”, of such support, leaving Kurds defenseless against the ISIS once more again.

I don't know how you feel about this, but to me, it is quite clear. Small Arms Survey is, thanks to its fanatical crusade for disarmament of decent people, in fact a silent accomplice of the Islamic State, because it strives to disarm its victims. Not due to some conspiracy, but because this is something all the anti-gun activists in the whole world do. Every one of them wants to take firearms away from decent people and thus serve them on a silver platter, as defenceless victims, to criminals who obviously won't turn in any arms and would keep running around with Kalashnikovs and Glocks. And in my opinion, it is high time to loudly speak out about and against this – especially when the SAS openly strives for disarmament and by this action subsequent murder and torture to death of victims of the Islamic State, about who everyone knows that no one else can help them.

Europe is at a crossroads: shall we draw inspiration from Interpol and Israel, or shall we serve our citizens to the terrorists?

It is time to show everyone that those who would like to ban firearms, led by Small Arms Survey and its collaborators in the European Commission, are, perhaps unintentionally, a fifth column of the Islamic State. And not only because they want to indirectly aid the slaughter and rape Kurdish men and women, but primarily because they want to make defenseless victims of us in the Europe, too.

The former Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble stated that there are only two options how to protect open societies from terrorist attacks like the one that took place in Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, where so-called “soft targets” were hit. Either to create secure perimeters around the locations, or rather to allow civilians to carry their own firearms, so they would be able to defend themselves in case a terrorist act occurs. And since, according to his words, “you can't have armed police forces everywhere”, it is clear what the only option is – and in year 2015, after attacks similar to Westgate took place in Paris and after Palestinian terrorists launched a tidal wave of lone-wolf attacks in Israel, his words proved to be true.

On the 13th November, Paris was full of policemen who protected the stadium, which would have been the original target of choice of the terrorists. However, when they couldn't pass through the police patrol, they simply attacked secondary targets, cafés and a music club, where nobody had a firearm. And since nobody could stop them, civilians could only in anguish await their death.

On the other hand, Israel chose the very solution Ronald Noble had recommended and allowed its citizens to arm themselves. It started with the Mayor of Jerusalem arming himself with the recommendation to fellow citizens to do the same. The thrown-down gauntlet has been picked up by the Israeli government which, unlike the apathetic European Commission, really cares for the well-being and safety of its citizens. Therefore, in reaction to the wave of terrorist acts, Israel made acquisition of firearms by decent, law abiding citizens even easier than before – for the second time.

The minister of Interior Gilad Erdan, exactly in the spirit of Ronald Noble from Interpol, said:

»In recent weeks, many citizens helped the Israel Police neutralize terrorists carrying out attacks. Citizens trained in the use of firearms are a force multiplier in the struggle against terror. In light of the security situation, I have decided to make it easier to obtain a gun permit.«

And that he was right became apparent once more and then again. For example, last time an armed civilian subdued terrorist, who was trying to run over soldiers.

It is time that both our government and the European Parliament with the European Commission, show the way they had chosen to fight terrorism. Whether by adopting a solution of real experts from Interpol and Israel, who face terrorism every day, the one solution that really works: armed, but trained and law-abiding civilians. Or the “solution” of do-gooder fanatics from Switzerland and UK, who want to disarm even victims of the Islamic State and hand us all over to the terrorists for the sake of an utopian vision of “a world without guns”… Which, off course, only applies to legally held firearms, not to the Kalashnikovs smuggled from the Balkans and Libya.

Ondřej Turek
Member of LEX Association