Readings leave writer inundated and irritated

This Board of Fisheries (BOF) appointment is beginning to turn into work!

I’m not complaining (well, yes, I am), but with only three weeks between major Southeast shellfish and finfish meetings, we received around 2000 pages of documentation to read in preparation for the finfish meeting. The last 750 pages showed up about four days before my scheduled flight to Sitka.

If somebody asked me, I would schedule the meeting with the most expected documentation first, to allow more time for board members to absorb the material. However, nobody asked me, and that scheduling would be meaningless anyhow if the Department of Fish and Game didn’t get the reports out in a timelier manner. We also receive more documents daily during the meeting, which then become that evening’s reading activity. I’ll get through it all before deliberations come up — but that will mean lots of late evening reading in Sitka!

Now that I’m done whining, my point with all this is that I haven’t done any of the fun things wintertime in the Mat-Su can offer yet. I talked with a gentleman the other day who had just returned from a Saturday of pike fishing through the ice on Flathorn Lake. That involved a snowmachining trip plus the icefishing activity. He said there were several other groups on the lake icefishing too.

That trip combined two of my favorite things to do during the winter — snowmachine and icefish. Oh well, maybe after I get back from Sitka! Wait a minute; we have another BOF meeting scheduled for mid-March in Anchorage. I guess I can always dream!

Since I’ve been homebound with reading, on breaks I’ve found some interesting but disturbing items on various Internet sites that could have significant negative impact on our firearms rights and probably the literal future of the country.

With a liberal, anti-gun president and a liberal, Democratically-controlled Congress, gun owners are in for some rough times. A bill introduced the first day of the present congressional session received zero media coverage that I saw. H. R. 45 (Blair Holt’s Firearms Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009) would apply to all gun owners in America.

Quoting from an online publication about this bill, “This nefarious bill seeks to strip all of our Constitutional Rights to possess and bear firearms of any distinction. It requires, within the first two years (after passage), that all new guns be registered. The bill goes retroactive after two years. Meaning that two years after the passage of the bill, ALL FIREARMS (emphasis in original) in a citizen’s possession must be registered, not just those purchased after the bill passes, and this apparently applies to antique firearms as well.”

A nominal fee of something like $25 per gun would apply for the initial registration and every five years from that point the gun owner must go through a complete renewal process for each firearm owned, probably on an escalating fee rate per gun. If you fail to comply, you face confiscation of the firearm and jail time of up to ten years per violation. The government would also be authorized to search your home without a warrant. There are some other threatening provisions in this bill too.

I’ve written several times before about a United Nations treaty floating around that, if ratified, would effectively eliminate our Second Amendment rights, banning firearms ownership by anyone other than police or the military. Counties that ratify the treaty are bound to it by international law. This treaty would be enforceable by UN troops. There’s another UN treaty out there dealing with human rights I’ve just read about.

This second treaty prohibits children from being spanked or homeschooled and forbids parents from deciding their families’ religion. Under this UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), every decision a parent makes can be reviewed by the government to determine whether it is in the child’s best interest.

This CRC treaty would allow children the right to choose their own religion, they would acquire a legally enforceable right to leisure, teaching children about Christianity in schools would be out of compliance, and children would have the right to reproductive health information and services, including abortions, without parental knowledge or consent.

This treaty has already been ratified by 193 nations, but not the United States. However, President Obama is quoted as saying about this treaty, “I will review this and other treaties to ensure the United States resumes its global leadership in human rights.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been a strong supporter of this CRC treaty and she now is in a position of direct control over the treaty’s submission to the Senate for ratification. Ratification would require a two-thirds vote in support.

If Obama is willing to consider ratifying a treaty which eliminates one’s parental authority over their own children in the name of human rights, how long do you think it will take him to introduce the small arms weapons ban treaty, again, in the name of human rights?

Is this the kind of “change we can believe in?” This is not the America I grew up in!

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by e-mailing sports@frontiersman.com.