"Appalled by the Bush administration's insistence that the UN conference not become a springboard for the destruction of 2A rights, a coalition of anti-gun groups organized a demonstration outside the UN during the conference. In conjunction the demonstration, the groups released a joint letter stating that the conference proved the necessity of additional anti-gun laws in the U.S. The groups included the Children's Defense Fund (an anti-welfare reform group), the Brady Campaign (formerly known as Handgun Control, Inc., formerly known as National Council to Control Handguns), Physicians for Social Responsibility, 'Million' Mom March chapters, and various other local groups. The letter read: "The Cold War is over, but the international community is suffering from a new source of terror: the glut of small arms and "civilian" weapons that are seeping from many industrialized nations, through channels both legal and illegal, to virtually all four corners of the globe." Note that the very idea of "civilians" owning weapons had to be put in quotation marks."

"At the end of the session, the United Nations delegates were forced to drop the two most contentious clauses in the agreement -- government sales to 'non-state actors' and restricting civilian possession of small arms -- because the U.S. opposed them." --UN Conference Agrees Crackdown on Small Arms Trade, Marjorie Olster, Daily News, July 2001

"He [Bob Barr] spoke a week after U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, the head of the U.S. delegation, warned the conference in a blunt opening-day speech that it should do nothing to restrict private ownership or constrain legal trade and legal manufacturing." --U.S. Delegate Warns UN on Plan to Curb Gun Trade, Irwin Areiff, Reuters, July 2001