Against the backdrop of a new national poll calling for stricter gun control in the wake of the mass killings of 32 people on a US university campus last week, the United Nations is getting ready to formulate a new international treaty regulating the proliferation of small arms worldwide.

“There is not yet a draft,” said Jennifer Abrahamson of Oxfam International, one of the lead organisations campaigning for the treaty, along with the London-based Amnesty International and International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). “What’s happening now is that governments are due to turn in their blueprints of what they believe a draft should look like,” she added. The hard deadline is the end of April, but submissions by the 192 UN member states will be accepted through Jun. 20.

According to last week’s poll, conducted by the New York Times and the Columbia Broadcasting System TV network, most Americans favoured stricter control of handguns in the wake of the killings of 32 people in a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech campus. But there was no widespread support for a total ban on handguns, the weapons used in the Virginia Tech shootings in the town of Blacksburg, Virginia.

The proposed treaty, which was supported by 153 members in a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly last December, does not envisage a total ban either. But the treaty is expected to call for a regulation of the production and sale of small arms, including handguns.

A UN expert panel has identified small arms to include assault rifles, pistols, sub-machine guns, light machine guns, mortars, portable anti-aircraft guns, grenade launchers, anti-tank missile and rocket systems, hand grenades and anti-personnel landmines.

At a UN press conference Monday, former UN high commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson stre-ssed that the handguns that had played a devastating role in the tragic deaths in Virginia Tech had been purchased legally. Asked about the countries, including the US, which had expressed reservations on the resolution calling for a treaty, Robinson said that “policy issues were internal to the US.” But she hoped that the sense of personal loss felt by Americans and others could bring home the terrible cost being paid in many countries around the world.

Asked who the sceptics of the treaty are, Abrahamson said that besides the US, these include China, Russia and several Arab states. But she pointed out that several other major international treaties “have gone through without the US and other sceptics.” A good example is the treaty banning landmines. If this is derailed for some reason, she said, the movement will continue outside the UN, as did the landmine treaty. But for now, barring the detractors, there is strong consensus to continue forward with a treaty, she emphasised.

Joseph Dube, a spokesperson for the IANSA arms control coalition, said there is a very real risk that sceptical governments, such as the US administration, could seek to water down the treaty, rendering it too weak to save lives. But “The over a million people around the world who support this treaty will not allow that to happen,” he warned.

Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry of the UK, who is also the current president of the UN Security Council, said, “The scale of the problem requires a UN multilateral response.” — IPS