a tiny victory

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Dave Kopel enthusiastically reports "U.N. Conference Ending, Freedom Winning!!":

As of 6 p.m. eastern time, the word from the United Nations small arms conference is that the conference is concluding with NO final document, and NO plans for any follow-up conference.

Who's responsible for this wonderful outcome? Why, Bush, of course:

If a few hundred votes had changed in Florida in 2000, or if 60,000 votes had changed in Ohio in 2004, the results of the 2001 and 2006 U.N. gun control conferences would have been entirely different. There would now be a legally binding international treaty creating an international legal norm against civilian gun ownership, a prohibition on the transfer of firearms to "non-state actors" (such as groups resisting tyrants), and a new newspeak international human rights standard requiring restrictive licensing of gun owners.

While I'm as glad as anyone that this foolish conference flopped, it is simply not that case that if Al Gore had won in 2000, we would be inexorably on the path to gun confiscation. Any treaty would still have to be passed by the U. S. Senate, which has more than enough Republicans to vote it down.

While it's nice to have a president who is very pro-gun, this result is a tiny drop of goodness in a vast sea of evil that is the Bush Administration. The evil and unnecessary war in Iraq, the non-stop encroachment on the rest of the Bill of Rights, outweigh anything good Dubya has done by a long shot.

Why are they so good on this issue and so bad on everything else? Is it just because of the NRA? Stuff like this seems to throw the thuggish behavior of this administration into sharp relief because it makes it clear that they can stand up for rights when they want to, they just don't want to.