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Today begins the most important 26-day period for our Second Amendment freedoms in recent history.

That’s because today, representatives from many of the world’s socialist, tyrannical and dictatorial regimes will gather at United Nations headquarters in New York for a month-long meeting, in which they’ll put the finishing touches on an international Arms Trade Treaty that could seriously restrict your freedom to own, purchase and carry a firearm.

Specifically, the U.N. wants to implement international gun registration requirements, bans on commonly owned firearms, tracking and registration of ammunition purchases, and create a new U.N. gun control bureaucracy.

You might think that something so obviously menacing to one of our enumerated fundamental rights would receive a strong rebuke from our top government leaders. But you’d be wrong. This is President Barack Obama’s vision for America, and we’re expected to just go along with it.

In fact, a group of anti-gun members of the U.S. House of Representatives, led by U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), went so far as to circulate a letter last week to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, in which they “strongly urge the United States to take a leadership role in pushing for a strong, verifiable Arms Trade Treaty.”

These House members insist that the treaty include “controls on a comprehensive list of weaponry, including small arms and light weapons,” as well as controls on ammunition. For good measure, they wrap their unconstitutional demands in the mantle of advancing “human rights” and preventing international violence.

Since when did it become fashionable for sitting members of Congress to lobby international thugs, tyrants and dictators against our own U.S. Constitution?

Rep. Grijalva should consider the plight of good people in countries like the Sudan, where it’s virtually impossible for an average citizen to legally own a firearm for self-defense.

He, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should open their eyes to the unspeakable human rights atrocities that exist in their gun-ban utopia. They ought to see how far their gun-confiscation agenda resonates with hundreds of thousands of defenseless Sudanese men, women and children who live in constant fear of being beaten, raped, sold into slavery or murdered.

It’s easy for Congressmen Raul Grijalva, James McGovern, Bobby Rush, Dennis Kucinich and every other signer of this woefully ignorant letter to sit on high — surrounded by the secure walls of freedom built by our strong Second Amendment rights — and dictate to oppressed citizens in other parts of the world that their lives would be better if they only had less freedom than we do in the United States.

Thankfully, these clueless representatives don’t speak for the majority of us. The NRA has been warning Americans about this ticking time bomb at the U.N. for over 15 years. Now it’s zero hour. Wayne LaPierre and I will be at U.N. headquarters in New York this week, fighting tooth and nail to protect the same constitution that Raul Grijalva and his pals swore an oath to uphold and defend.

And I can promise you, we won’t stop fighting until our Second Amendment freedoms are safe from this international disgrace.

Chris W. Cox is the Executive Director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and serves as the organization’s chief lobbyist.