The following news magazine is a paid program of the National Rifle Association.
I've always thought of my grandfather and the people of his generation as heroes.
In fact, they've become known as America's greatest generation.
Because as time has passed, we've all realized that their generation,
the GI generation or World War II, literally saved the world.
And they did it in the name of freedom.
When they waved goodbye to their young wives and small children,
they knew that the war was as much about their families and their freedom
as it was about the plight of the French or the Poles or the Chinese.
And they saved the world.
Now, 60 years later, almost all that's left are war widows and war movies
and the medals in the monuments that honor them, the greatest generation.
Sometimes it seems that gene for greatness is gone forever,
buried with all those heroes who possessed it.
Well, I've got good news.
In the next few minutes, you'll see that there's a whole new hope
with a whole new generation, but also a whole new world of trouble.
I hope you'll stay tuned.
When we talk about our children,
sometimes we hold our breath and hold out hope
because we all love our children.
Parents around the world want everything for their children,
opportunity and achievement and fulfillment.
We ache and yearn as they live and learn
because we would give all, withhold nothing,
so our children could have a better world, a better life than our own.
Well, if you ever had high hopes for the coming generation of kids,
I think you're in for a pleasant surprise.
Stay with us.
I'd like you to think of a teenager you know,
a kid 18 years old or younger, someone born in 1982 or later,
maybe a grandson, a stepdaughter, a niece or nephew.
What kind of kids are they?
What kind of generation are they?
Well, some people would have you believe that youth arrests,
classroom cheating, youth drug abuse, teen sex, teen pregnancy,
teen abortion and teen suicides are all up.
They might also have you believe that high school test scores,
hours of homework, hours of housework, college ambition, teen happiness
and respect for parents are all down.
But every one of those statements about this new generation is false.
And you're not going to believe the good things researchers are saying about them.
Forget the baby boomers. Forget Generation X.
These are the millennials.
The new generation of Americans that has more in common with the GI generation
than any generation before or since.
That's why researchers Neil Howe and William Strauss say the millennials
may become America's next great generation.
Let me tell you some facts about the millennials, kids now 18 and under.
They're optimistic and upbeat.
Nine in ten describe themselves as happy and confident about the world they're inheriting.
They're team players. They're more conventional.
They respect authority.
Nine in ten say they feel close to their parents.
And get this, half say they trust government to do what's best.
Well, they're still kids.
If you want to have hope, just look to the millennial generation.
As Diane McCann wrote in Forbes Magazine,
goodbye to body piercing green hair, grunge music and the deliberately uncouth look.
Hello to kids who look up to their parents and think bowling is fun.
I know they don't remember the Cold War, Watergate, JFK, MLK,
the Challenger Explosion, Student Riots or stadiums named after heroes instead of corporations.
But they're more lawful and civic minded.
Over the last six years, the rates of homicide, violent crime, abortion and pregnancy among teens
have dropped at the fastest rates ever recorded.
A teen today is less likely to be a victim of violent crime
than at any time since Lyndon Johnson was president.
And despite all the hysteria, a teen is far more likely to be hit by a bolt of lightning
than be killed at school.
What's more, the millennials are healthier, better mannered, more spiritual, more sexually chased
and the most ethnically diverse generation in American history.
I know the millennials can't imagine a pizza if it's not delivered,
a phone that won't fit in their pocket or a movie that can't be owned.
But eight in ten say it's cool to be smart.
And they take the Pledge of Allegiance and flag saluting more seriously
than Gen Xers or Boomers ever did.
The millennials are a powerhouse generation of technology planners, community shapers,
institution builders and world leaders, said the researchers.
Perhaps destined to dominate the 21st century like the noble GI generation dominated the 20th.
Think about what that means. American greatness may be back.
These kids may save the world again.
This is a generation that can preserve the purity of American freedom,
a generation with a heart to love it and the brains to protect it,
if you and I can preserve freedom long enough to give it to them.
Why does this generation magically possess the finest of American ideals?
It's hard to say. Maybe it's a divine gift of faith.
It's like the gods of human progress pick a generation to sprinkle with freedom's fairy dust
and bathe their blood with a fearlessness that rejects oppression and demands achievement.
They only come along once in a while.
Those are the kinds of special generations that gave mankind the renaissance,
the enlightenment, the founding of this country and 60 years ago the liberation of humanity.
Just as the GI generation saved the world, freedom may have found salvation in the millennials
if we do our part and just in time.
It's just in time because bit by bit government has welcomed itself into your personal finances,
your communications, your gun safe, your workplace, your high school football game, even your parenting.
Layers of bureaucrats are paid to invade your privacy and impede your freedom
from where you can pray to how to talk to your kids about drugs and sex and violence.
Some say freedom is safe for now because of who's in the White House and Congress,
but that's not where freedom resides.
Nor does freedom flow from the parchment promises in our Constitution.
Freedom resides exclusively in the hearts of those who defend it.
Freedom exists only if you're willing to sacrifice for it
and freedom's future is only as bright as the passion we ignite in our young.
That's why the millennial generation can be the world's insurance policy
that preserves freedom for generations to come, but only if we deliver freedom to them whole,
pure, complete, unfettered, and intact.
As you'll see, we're up against a world of opposition.
that American freedoms are not to be surrendered,
but preserved intact for future generations to possess and pass on.
You'll join four million other Americans who cherish freedom
and whose united voice means our freedoms might have a future
in the hearts and hands of generations to come.
So call this toll-free number now to get your silver bullet keepsake, your shooter's cap, and join the NRA.
For years, behind the scenes around the world,
privately funded groups have been meeting in the name of the United Nations,
that building right there to decide how the world ought to work for the next generation.
A lot of people think the UN is moving far beyond its original charter,
now acting as the world's self-appointed keeper of global standards for everything,
from water quality to telecommunications to freedom itself.
And by the UN's yardstick, you've got too much freedom.
Just as the millennial generation arrives to take custody of the purest freedom on the planet,
the brains of the United Nations think they've got a better idea than the Bill of Rights.
With that story, here's Ginny Simone.
Basically, we were turning to what I like to call sheep.
You know, we were there right for the picking for both by criminal and the government.
Carlos Santillian, now an American citizen,
remembers all too well the freedoms he and his family were denied,
growing up in the Philippines where Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law,
putting honest citizens at the mercy of his dictatorship,
ordering them to register their firearms and then forcing them to turn them in.
This is my brother and my father. They're in Mexico here.
Joseph de Soto, a flight to freedom is what brought his family here.
Photos of relatives, a constant reminder, he says,
of how his ancestors, an entire village, was betrayed and massacred by the Mexican government,
a government that promised to protect them from armed rebels and marauders.
The reason my family is here in the United States now is that my relatives were exterminated by government forces,
which were in the northern part of Mexico to protect the ranchers and the villagers.
Well, they disarmed the ranchers, they disarmed the villagers,
and three days later they killed all the men.
The harsh lessons of history never learned,
where the loss of liberty is paid for in the loss of innocent lives,
a tragedy that continues to be played out today.
In England, Australia, Canada and South Africa,
where firearms have been banned, rounded up and surrendered to the saw blade and blast furnace,
crime has skyrocketed.
The facts are simply armed crimes have gone up
and more and more firearms have been imported into England illegally.
Once upon a time, people's houses would be broken in when they weren't home.
What's happening today is that the offender, the bad guys, are happy to break into somebody's house.
They're not frightened to break into somebody's house while they're at home.
Gun bans that have backfired, but governments refusing to admit it.
Instead, these same countries are now conspiring with the United Nations,
insisting that the only way to combat the illegal possession of firearms
is to restrict, reduce and ultimately remove legally owned firearms from law-abiding citizens.
The UN's agenda? To impose its own standard of freedom, global gun prohibition.
The global mission would be a relatively gun-free future for the world's people.
I would agree with her entirely, but being a realist, I think it has to be a gradual process.
We cannot solve this problem in one fell swoop, but I think she's right by saying that is the goal.
That's why here at the United Nations, delegates from around the world will meet for a global conference on small arms.
For the first time ever here on American soil, part of their agenda will be to regulate firearms
not only held by nations, but by individual citizens.
In fact, many people believe the UN's mission is to redefine your firearms freedom.
The biggest danger in a global gun control standard set by the United Nations
is that we would lose the freedom that we have in this country.
It would effectively be undermined.
The plan has already been scripted.
In this so-called documentary by the UN, emotional images of mothers crying,
child soldiers and rampant gunfire are used to drive home the message
that legal guns owned by lawful American citizens are somehow to blame
committed by armed terrorists, genocidal rogue armies and drug smugglers around the world
in places where freedom doesn't even exist.
Given the problems a country like Colombia has because of firearms
and because the looseness with which firearms are sold is causing a lot of violence in our country.
When you read the documents coming out of the United Nations,
they refer to civilian ownership of firearms as a destabilizing thing
and they believe if we were to prohibit law-abiding citizens from owning firearms
that somehow our communities would be safer.
One gets the solid feeling that the United Nations is actually reluctant to hear the truth.
Once it's got a nice campaign going, a good emotional campaign that it's doing good for the world,
it doesn't want it to be disrupted by an awkward thing called the truth.
Facts that don't matter.
The truth that registration won't stop criminals, warlords or drug smugglers from getting their guns
still won't stop the UN from proceeding as planned.
Mandating all firearms be registered in a worldwide database
under the authority and oversight of the United Nations.
We need to have national laws for the registration of weapons.
If I have a weapon at home, my government must know that I have that weapon.
International terrorist organizations will never comply with the laws
and what you'll wind up with is gun control on an international level
specifically designed to be used against honest law-abiding people.
Reason enough for the UN to set its sights on what it calls small arms to regulate and eliminate them.
My definition would be fairly elastic.
But it's clear with a definition so broad what the UN really means is all firearms.
To them, a bazooka and your Beretta, a machine gun and your hunting rifle are one in the same.
I'm not sure there's a definition of small arms.
It seems in the minds of the promoters to mean anything that they wish it to mean.
Talk to the UN participants and it's clear in their utopian world of global gun control
only the police and military would be allowed to have firearms.
We're sending a very clear message out.
There is no need for civilians to own handguns and that's it.
I think in all democratic structures, I think provision is made for governmental forces.
That should really reduce if not eliminate the necessity for citizens to carry arms.
In the case of our country, ideally, certainly only the law enforcement people
because that would mean then that there would be no crime.
But despite these governments insisting their citizens trust and rely on only them for protection,
all too often the innocent are left defenseless.
If you phone the police, you tell them you have been attacked with own gun points,
and you come down to the station, we're also afraid we won't come.
They come down and report the matter.
So it's the reason why I think it is the right thing for me to have a gun.
In the Philippines when I was growing up, the police were not only were they not always there,
some of them wouldn't even act unless you paid them.
And currently, from what I understand, it's still the same.
And Joseph De Soto remembers all too well.
After two separate trips to his homeland, he was victimized by the same government authorities sworn to protect him.
The first trip that was robbed at gunpoint by the federales,
the second trip was robbed by the police.
The whole idea that the government is going to protect the citizen is outrageous.
Outrageous enough for the UN to keep its plans a deep dark secret,
conducting meetings for the past several years behind closed doors,
crowded in secrecy and silence as Jim Panku, a member of the Canadian Parliament, found out.
Twice, Jim applied to be an observer at the UN's proceedings, and twice he was denied by his own government.
Why an elected representative would be denied access to a meeting like that should cause great concern.
But unfortunately, people seem to have their head in the sand a bit on this issue.
That's why, as Congressman Barr points out, it's vital the NRA maintain its NGO non-governmental status,
one of only two pro-gun NGOs to have that accreditation and access.
Even though that doesn't give the NRA a voice in the decision making, it performs an essential function,
and that is to have outside observers be able to monitor at least part of what's going on here.
So the stage is set, but UN officials stress that any politically binding agreement or treaty
they approve at the Small Arms Conference is just the start.
It's a process, so I don't see this as the end all of the process.
It is another step. I think we have a long way to go.
The UN, under the guise of peace and safety, rendering your rights guaranteed by the Constitution
to be meaningless as part of its new global standard of freedom.
We talked to the United Nations Representative Fund. They perceived the US and the Second Amendment
as a serious problem, which they would like to get rid of.
The Second Amendment rewritten and your rights redefined?
A bronze statue of a twisted gun outside UN headquarters stands as testimony to its agenda
and its determination to fulfill it.
The warning from citizens who have already lived the reality? No one is immune.
The end result is that we all face the greater risk of losing our personal firearms.
And it would be too pessimistic to go beyond that.
They probably won't take them away from me in my lifetime, probably.
But my children will probably never own them.
And their children, almost certainly, never own them.
And that will be a bad thing for my children, for my grandchildren, and for society.
The one thing that we all have in common is our love of freedom and our sense of freedom.
And really, without freedom, are we still Americans? Is this still the United States?
I know something about truly epic stories, and this one's not being told.
This is the epic story of the systematic disarming of free peoples around the globe
under the abiding hand of the United Nations. It's as chilling as the utter silence
from American media on the subject.
What bigger story is there than to take American freedom,
the greatest freedom ever conceived and achieved,
and reduce it to some lesser global standard instead of the other way around?
Please stay tuned to hear what Wayne LaPierre has to say and what you can do about it.
It tells the world you won't tolerate foreign government influence
to first control and finally confiscate your personal firearms.
Think about it. Who but the NRA can fight on every front,
from state capitals to Congress to the UN,
defending your right to keep and bear arms from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
So call this toll-free number now to get your Charlton Heston silver bullet keepsake
and join the NRA.
That's where it's all happening, the United Nations.
Now it might be true that the United Nations can't directly impose its will on American gun owners,
but it can demonize you and your ownership of guns
by deciding that the world standard of firearm freedom should be no firearm freedom.
Who really thinks that the great minds at the UN have outclassed our founding fathers?
Who really thinks that countless committees of nameless foreigners
have dreamt up a better idea than the Bill of Rights?
Why don't they champion our quality of freedom instead of theirs?
Because their global standard of firearm freedom will be reserved for the powerful few.
It will be oppressive, it will be elitist, it will be irreversible, and it will be abused.
Let's be honest with ourselves, despite all our lip service about liberty,
our generation, the one in charge of the world right now,
has less reverence for freedom than any in memory.
Around the globe, supposedly free people are being disarmed systematically,
and all too often, willingly.
Look at the people of South Africa, Canada, England, and Australia,
where they've turned in their guns and without exception,
confronted more violent crime in return.
That poison has even reached our shores.
In California, tens of thousands of gun owners must either turn in certain guns
or accept their new status as felons.
According to the UN, that'll be global policy.
Look, we can't claim to be custodians of freedom
when our generation is disarming us right under our noses.
And we can't pass on freedom to the millennials that is minimized, compromised,
or worst of all, globalized.
Don't get me wrong, nobody wants illegal military arms trafficking,
stolen missile launchers being sold on the black market to rogue armies and terrorists.
The UN's also talking about privately owned firearms,
drawing no distinction between legal guns and illegal guns,
between a missile launcher and your shotgun.
To them, a bazooka and your browning, they're both just small arms.
They're saying your freedoms cause their problems,
so they want a new global, quote, norm of non-possession.
But since most of the citizens of other countries represented in that building
are already disarmed, just whose guns are they after?
People come to this country because of what she stands for, our Statue of Liberty.
This great lady welcomed countless immigrants to our homeland,
and she waved goodbye to countless U.S. soldiers sent to defend their homelands.
But now these foreign countries, who we've rescued from despots and disease,
whose debts we've forgiven, these grandchildren of the people who bombed Pearl Harbor,
these descendants of European countries liberated with American blood,
these countries now lecture us about the liberty she stands for?
They want the marvelous millennial generation to be not American citizens, but global citizens.
With a quality of personal freedom not elevated to ours, but reduced down to theirs.
I say never.
Freedom came to us from the hand of God, into the hearts of our founders,
across Concord Bridge, and through two grueling, glorious centuries.
Our ancestors hand-delivered to us freedom, safeguarded by the Second Amendment.
And with it, we saved the world.
The world will not take it away.
First, let's call upon the American media to stop ignoring this epic story
of U.N. sanctioned disarming of free people around the world.
Let's challenge the media to investigate this multinational conspiracy
and expose who's organizing it, who's financing it, and who's benefiting from it.
And then let's call a traitor a traitor.
Any American citizen or group collaborating with foreign forces
to undermine our freedoms is courting treason.
And let's call upon our government to condemn and oppose any U.N. effort
to diminish personal freedom.
On the contrary, I say the global standard for personal freedom
should be but one standard, ours.
This is the message we must send to the world,
and most of all to the coming millennial generation.
Just when either oppression or liberty could go global,
destiny delivers to us what just might be the world's salvation,
freedom's next great generation.
Our duty is to give them the full measure of American freedom,
to take root in our most fertile generation yet,
and flourish and thrive so that America might never import tyranny,
but as always and forever more, export freedom.
If you want to preserve your right to keep and bear arms,
call and join the NRA now.
Your two-year membership includes a subscription to the NRA magazine you prefer,
plus a no-fee MasterCard and special member benefits.
But join now, and you'll also get a handsome silver bullet memento
engraved with Charlton Heston's signature,
plus a black and gold shooter's cap.
They tell the world you won't tolerate foreign government influence
to first control and finally confiscate your personal firearms.
Think about it, who but the NRA can fight on every front,
from state capitals to Congress to the UN,
defending your right to keep and bear arms from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
So call this toll-free number now to get your silver bullet keepsake,
your shooter's cap, and join the NRA.
This news magazine was a paid program of the National Rifle Association.