David Codrea:

Heated divisions among activist gun owners have surfaced with a December 2 announcement on Facebook by Brandon Webb, a former SEAL and author, that he is considering running for the National Rifle Association Board of Directors. Webb’s statement and reactions to it were noticed by The Patriot Perspective, which took him to task for, among other things, his assertion that the NRA was “not willing to compromise and create gun legislation that makes sense.”

David continues to explain what Webb has said, and laments the lack of involvement of gun owners in deciding NRA leadership and policy.  I do too, and I don’t know what more I can do.  I’ve made calls to the NRA, and I blog until I’m too tired to go on.  I do have a day job that gets in the way of blogging.  Gun owners need to do more.  And as for compromise of any sort, recall what I said just recently.

… there is no grand bargain on guns.  There is no compromise.  There is no cooperation.  There is only war between us as long as the collectivists want to enforce their will upon us.  There will never be peace.  That’s a promise.

I don’t need to hear more of his positions.  I call for political and ideological battle, not compromise.  I would rather hear a call to arms than speechification and pontification on the politics of liberty – as if I need a lesson in philosophy, theology or politics from this guy.  Sorry buddy, but you’re trying to “teach your granny to suck eggs,” as the saying goes.  Been there, done that.  I can pontificate with the best of them.

Kurt Hofmann:

Ah . . . “to ‘effectively‘ convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns,” with “effectively” in this context basically meaning “not really.” What they are referring to here are “bump fire” stocks …

One might inquire about the three gun competitors, some of whom (at the professional level) get so good that they don’t need either fully automatic or bump fire, having to modify the bolt mass and buffer springs of their weapons to keep up with the rate of fire they can accomplish with their fingers.

But it isn’t really about rapid fire.  It’s just another way to go after liberty.  This is just one more front in the progressive war on guns.  It will be interesting to see what Amazon does with this.  I’ll keep my eye on this – and I would ask Kurt to follow it too – in order to modify my shopping practices if Amazon folds like a cheap suit.

Mike Vanderboegh has a number of interesting posts today, but this one caught my eye from Rolling Stone.

All over America, communities are failing. Once-mighty Rust Belt capitals that made steel or cars are now wastelands. Elsewhere, struggling white rural America is stocking up on canned goods and embracing the politics of chaos, sending pols to Washington ready to hit the default button and start the whole national experiment all over again.

But in Camden, chaos is already here. In September, its last supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a “food desert” by the USDA. The place is literally dying, its population having plummeted from above 120,000 in the Fifties to less than 80,000 today. Thirty percent of the remaining population is under 18, an astonishing number that’s 10 to 15 percent higher than any other “very challenged” city, to use the police euphemism. Their home is a city with thousands of abandoned houses but no money to demolish them, leaving whole blocks full of Ninth Ward-style wreckage to gather waste and rats.

It’s a major metropolitan area run by armed teenagers with no access to jobs or healthy food, and not long ago, while the rest of America was ranting about debt ceilings and Obamacares, Camden quietly got pushed off the map. That was three years ago, when new governor and presumptive future presidential candidate Chris Christie abruptly cut back on the state subsidies that kept Camden on life support. The move left the city almost completely ungoverned – a graphic preview of what might lie ahead for communities that don’t generate enough of their own tax revenue to keep their lights on. Over three years, fires raged, violent crime spiked and the murder rate soared so high that on a per-capita basis, it “put us somewhere between Honduras and Somalia,” says Police Chief J. Scott Thomson.

“They let us run amok,” says a tat-covered ex-con and addict named Gigi. “It was like fires, and rain, and babies crying, and dogs barking. It was like Armageddon.”

Not long ago, Camden was everything about America that worked. In 1917, a report counted 365 industries in Camden that employed 51,000 people. Famous warships like the Indianapolis were built in Camden’s sprawling shipyards.

Part of the problem is corrupt police and the police union.  Another part of the problem is that – as engineers like me know all too well – large scale steel manufacturing and ship building is no longer done in the U.S.  It is outsourced to Japan and China, neither of which culture understands QA and none of which can produce the quality of American products.  Nonetheless, it allows corporations to hire overseas workers, or better yet, hire Mexicans at facilities in Canada or the U.S., where the ratepayer and taxpayer picks up the tab for welfare, food stamps, medical care and other expenses, which is a form of corporate welfare.

Another part of the problem is corrupt people who revert to killing and harming each other when times get tough, lacking any values because the country has rejected God.  The prescription is multifaceted and difficult because no one will implement all of the cultural changes that need to be made.  This is why folks who understand aren’t sanguine about the future.  America as you have known it is dead, and it isn’t coming back – at least in the same form.  It will need to be multiple countries very loosely coupled, and states will have to become the true laboratories of democracy, uninhibited by the federal government so that there is immediate and unmistakable feedback when the state goes adrift.