TexasCHLforum.com

When I saw Obama's comments in the news I thought, 'What's in this treaty, anyway?' I did a little googling on 'CIFTA' and found a 'model' law proposed by the drafters in 2006. Needless to say, this treaty is really scary...

The intent is to allow a law enforcement agent to get a detailed history on any firearm or ammunition confiscated in a crime so that arms traffickers can be more easily found and prosecuted. The method to do this is to uniquely mark all firearms/ammunition and record every transaction so that the firearm/ammunition can be traced to a country of origin and an owner/manufacturer.

While the goal of the treaty is admirable, it will mean a number of significant changes to US law:

All sales/transfers of firearms and ammunition, and possibly the parts and components to produce them, would have to be traceable to an owner/manufacturer. This is essentally a national firearms and ammunition registry.

It would be illegal to manufacture firearms and ammunition without unique markings to identify country of origin, manufacturer, and lot number in the case of ammunition.

It would also be illegal to tamper with or try to remove the unique markings mentioned above.

I'm really concerned about what this treaty would mean for those of us who handload/reload ammunition--will each handloader/reloader have to register as a manufacturer and put unique headstamps on the ammunition they create? How do we handle the old headstamps on used brass? Will it become illegal to reload used brass?

I seriously hope that the US either doesn't ratify this treaty, or at least ignores the parts that would be unconstitutional or too burdensome to implement, like tracking all firearm and ammunition sales, adding requirements to handloaders/reloaders, and creating a national firearm registry.

I have a .pdf of the 'model' law; let me know if anyone would like a copy or if I should post it on the site somewhere.