There is a lot of fear/discomfort/propaganda regarding this resolution. I was invited to be part of a Facebook group called Parental rights and their main page says “This treaty, as harmless as it may appear, is capable of attacking the very core of the child-parent relationship, removing parents from their central role in the growth and development of a child, and replacing them with the long arm of government supervision within the home.” One of those areas, interestingly enough, includes guns.

I read an article in the Home School Legal Defense Association’s magazine which I believe came from ParentalRights.org that talks about a UNICEF brochure called “No Guns Please, We Are Children.” The article can be found here. Some bullet points that the article talks about include:

• Efforts must be ongoing to overcome the destructive messages that small arms and light weapons are essential instruments for survival and protection in daily life.
• Governments must support communities in eliminating the insecurity, fear and instability that often lead people to acquire and keep guns.
• Regulations are needed to ensure that small arms and light weapons are not easy to acquire and are never accessible to children.

Now, I agree with points one an two and most of three. The sticking point for me is where they say that small arms and light weapons should never be accessible to children (defined as those under eighteen). Like it or not we have a “gun culture” in America and part of that culture includes hunting. When you have a culture where guns are used to hunt you are going to have children who want to be part of that and parents who want them to be a part. I personally don’t have a problem with that. I know that the heart of the brochure is referring to children used as soldiers and I don’t think that most sane people in this country want to see Johnny packing heat to commit violence against another person, but I think the UNICEF brochure goes to far in wanting to remove all access to guns from kids. Parents do need to be responsible and as such when there is an incident involving a gun and parental neglect the book needs to be thrown. That shouldn’t preclude a sixteen year old from being able to hunt with their dad.

The other big thing I hear bandied about is the stance of the CRC on corporal punishment i.e. spanking. The most interesting and disconcerting part of the wiki article on the CRC is this:

The Committee on the Rights of the Child of its own volition decided in 2006, long after the Convention had been signed by member states and come into force in 1990, and without any public consultation or democratic input, to interpret Article 37 as meaning that any form of corporal punishment, even the mildest spanking, should be made a criminal offence.

Article 37 concerns cruel and degrading punishment. So again this sounds like a case where the CRC wants to do something really good, something that all right minded folks should agree with and takes it one step too far.

I guess that’s the scary thing for me. I mean on the one hand I don’t want to be the only country other than Somalia to not sign/ratify the thing. On the other hand this is a pretty major deal when it comes to changes our country’s way of doing certain things. If this is considered a treaty then Constitutionally we are bound to uphold it. We could ratify it with reservations as others have done and that may be the best course of action.

At what point does it cease having meaning if we do that though? I mean Saudi Arabia ratified it and they impose capital punishment on minors. Oh wait, we did too until very recently. So should we even bother based on hte grounds that it has no teeth? What do you think?