As a followup to my article Note To Cops And Survivalists: The World Is Full Of Animals, Embrace It!, Mountain Guerrilla posted a piece on animals and logistics (via WRSA), although he didn’t link back to my article.

Mosby spends some time rehearsing an Army field manual on animals and logistics, with some good suggestions for the proper use of horses.  Then he poses this.

Do you know how to ride a horse? I don’t mean sit on a horse in the lesson arena either. Have you ever ridden a horse across country, through the brush? Across steep terrain. Like I said, I’m not an expert, but I’ve done both of these enough to know…and witness…untrained people fall off horses all the fucking time in rough terrain, seldom with healthy results. Have you ever actually sat on a horse ALL day long? I helped some neighbors pack a camp into the Bob Marshall Wilderness area a couple of years ago. I’d always wanted to get into the backcountry of the “Bob,” and it seemed like a much easier alternative to walking in. What would have been a two-day round trip for them turned into a four-day trip because, after sitting on a horse for 16 hours straight on the ride in? I literally, could not walk the next two days, let alone get back on the horse to ride out. It was not pretty, at all…and I’m in pretty good condition.

Check.  All of the above.  I have fallen off, been thrown off, bitten, run over, kicked, and just about anything that can happen on or around a horse.  I have ridden horses all day long, and I do mean all … day … long, and gotten on to do it again the next day.  And the next day.  And the next day.  I have fed them, herded them, doctored them, and assisted them to mate.  If you’ve never witnessed horses mating first hand (and I’m not talking about watching the Discovery Channel), it can be a violent affair.  I’ve ridden with saddles and then also (in my much younger years) bareback over mountain tops along narrow trails while running the herd).  The hardest ride was bareback and (on a dare) without a bridle, only the halter.

From the age of fourteen and beyond into my early twenties, I worked weekends and summers at a Christian camp above Marietta, South Carolina named Awanita Valley (and Awanita Ranch in Traveler’s Rest).  We trained and trail rode horses, fed them and cared for them, hiked the trails and cleared them of snakes and yellow jacket nests (have you ever been on a horse when it came up on a yellow jacket nest?).

When we weren’t doing that, we were cutting wood, hauling supplies, digging ditches, and baling hay.  My boys did the same thing, and Daniel later (before the Marine Corps) worked for Joey Macrae in Anderson, South Carolina, an extraordinary professional horseman, breaking and training horses.  I have ridden in the rain, blazing sun, and snow.  I have seen my son Joshua and his horse buried up to his thighs in snow, and watched him ride the horse up from sinking in the drift and stay on him while keeping the horse and him safe.

Why is all (or any) of this important?  Because as I tried to convey in my earlier post, it is critical to have an understanding and mastery over animals, especially if what we think will happen in America really happens.  And Mountain Guerrilla is right about logistics too.  But I’m not so sure that the Army was the first to field this idea.  See my article on Marines and Mules.  The Small Wars Journal had discussion on the importance of animals to logistics long ago.

The problem is that the Marine Corps has forgotten the lessons, and I’m afraid that the Army will never really take them to heart.  The modern U.S. military is techno-weighted down, with gadgetry, doohickeys, and reliance on constant logistics.  The so-called big dog is a symptom of this sickness, as is the huge budget for DARPA every year.  Truthfully, I think this is all related to the effete pressure for gender neutrality in the military.

But don’t you forget these lessons.  Plan ahead.  Learn how to make fire, how to purify water, how to fight, how to make your way around terrain, and how to navigate with maps and a compass (rather than using GPS like the liar Marine Corps officer candidates who were found out during officer’s school).

And learn animals.  Your life will be better for it.  This goes for cops too.  Lina Inverse makes an interesting point.

It just occurred to me that this puppycide policy is extremely unwise, because the desensitization works both ways. Every time a thug in uniform needlessly kills a family’s dog, that family in turn is that much more ready to return the favor someday….

It’s what Mike Vanderboegh calls losing the mandate of heaven.  At one time in our history, constables were respected and admired.  Children wanted to talk to them, show them respect, and even be like them.  Nowadays, with enough rifles pointed at women and children while screaming obscenities, with enough dead animals, with enough abuse and danger from cops, it may not be long before the people turn on cops.

If you’re a cop, you don’t want that to happen.  Believe me.  You don’t want that to happen.  You want to maintain the “mandate of heaven.”  If you lose it, you’ve lost everything.

Make sure to drop by Mountain Guerrilla and read his informed article.

There are two recent reports of dog shootings by cops in the news lately, one by the Nampa, Idaho Police Department, and another by the Mobile, Alabama Police Department (via David Codrea).  This behavior of reflexive, frightened shooting of dogs follows a pattern that we have observed before here and here, and just like we have observed elsewhere.

Before my children ever left home, they had been well-trained in at least rudimentary animal science.  They have been around animals of all flavor, knew how to ride, care for, train and (to some extent) doctor horses, knew how to raise dogs, and could handle themselves around most animals.  At least they knew when being around an animal required caution.  They knew how to build fire, rappel, and be at home in woodlands and mountains (although here I am diverging from the main subject).

If you are a law enforcement officer and know nothing about animals, are frightened all of the time around them, and cannot assert yourself at the proper time and in the proper way, there are options for you.  You can volunteer your time at local farms, ranches and dog breeders, and you can purchase and raise your own dogs.  You need to become accustomed to being around cattle, horses, goats, dogs and other such animals.  If you choose to ignore this gap in your training and life experiences, and you choose to run around frightened of everything that moves, but you relinquish your badge and gun, then who am I to infringe on your rights?  Do as you wish, and leave me out of it.

But if you choose to be that kind of person, where you ignore gaps in your knowledge and experience base, but you continue to carry a badge and gun, I think you’re a panty waist.  You are an irresponsible person who should feel bad about themselves, and you’re dangerous to those of us around you, and especially dangerous to animals.  You’re unqualified to have your job, and you are basically a liability to the community.  But I’m saying more than that.  I think you’re a panty waist.

There are only one or two breeds for which I would consider use of something like OC spray, and that would probably only be necessary if they were trained fighting dogs.  In any case, if you place yourself in a position where you are running from an animal while you’re on a call, then in addition to being a panty waist you’re an idiot.  You should knock on the door if you want an owner to secure his animals.  It isn’t any more complicated than that.

Now a note to survivalists.  You might spend time, money and energy on being prepared to survive in the wilderness, or perhaps being tactically competent.  But if your planning, education and preparation doesn’t include a moderate knowledge of and mastery over animals, then your preparations are incomplete and your calculus is faulty.  There are animals out there who truly can harm you, such as (in the West) brown bear, cougar and moose, and (in the East) black bear if they’re badly hungry, or feral hogs.

You need to know when you need dogs with you.  Daniel dispatched this hog with a fixed blade Ka-Bar, but he had pit bulls with him for strike dogs.  I won’t go into the mountains without a dog and gun.  A feral hog with turn on you and cut your femoral artery, and if he doesn’t respect you, a horse can turn on you and kill you.  Horses don’t love you or even like you.  Horses learn to tolerate you in what they consider to be a mutually beneficial relationship.  Know them.  Understand them.

And that’s the key, isn’t it?  An ATV will run out of fuel.  With the exception of certain necessary things such as worming medication, a horse is self feeding, and I would rather have a good Quarter Horse or Appaloosa than an ATV any day in most parts of woodland or mountain America.  You need to understand what animals can do to you, what they can do for you, and how to manage them the proper way rather than reading books or relying on the internet.  Or for LEOs, rather than shooting them because you’re scared like a little girl.

Fox Carolina:

CLEMSON, SC (FOX Carolina) – A photo of a sign that hung inside a Clemson bar telling customers guns are not allowed has sparked outrage online because of the wording on the sign.

The sign read, “No concealed weapons. If you are such a loser that you feel you need to carry a gun with you when you go out, I don’t want your business. D-bag.”

The owner of Backstreets Pub and Grill, who did not want to be identified because of the backlash, said it has all been blown out of proportion.

“I just used the wrong wording,” he said.

Since the photo was shared, he took down the bar’s Facebook page and the Yelp profile has been slammed with negative reviews because of the sign. The sign was hung up after South Carolina legalized concealed weapons in bars earlier in 2014. The law does not allow people legally carrying to drink.

“There’s no reason in a college town to bring a gun into a college bar with college kids and that’s just what I was trying to get passed,” he said.

The owner said the sign is not about taking away customers’ second amendment rights. He also has his own permit.

“I’m a gun owner, I got a right to carry permit when they first came out,” he said.

But when asked why he typed up the sign, he said he was frustrated following the law.

“I was just frustrated, I had one more thing to worry about,” the owner said.

No reason, he says.  So college students don’t have a right to self defense?  Yea, he does have something to worry about.  College kids getting killed because they can’t defend themselves in his establishment.

Prior: Do You Carry A Gun?  Are You A Douche Bag?

David Codrea:

“ATF carried out these storefront sting operations across the country, from Oregon to Florida, and utilized deplorable tactics including exploiting mentally disabled individuals to generate business and later arresting them, setting up storefronts near schools, and even losing high-powered firearms … “It is surprising that failures such as Operation Fearless in Milwaukee occurred despite this enhance oversight from ATF leadership”

I would rather have thought that it was specifically because of this enhanced leadership that these things occurred.  Of course, this feature of the system isn’t a bug.  It’s by design.

Kurt Hofmann:

There is perhaps a compromise to be found here for people living under such laws. Defy those laws, obtain the “illegal” guns–even if you have to make them yourself in order to do so. Don’t register them (obviously)–perhaps even convert the registration forms into atmospheric carbon, just to get the “progressives” still more hot under the collar. But also maintain at least one “legal” AR-15, even if doing so requires odd gadgetry like the ARMagLock and the “SAFE Act”-compliant stock–just to let the other side know that however many gun ban laws they come up with, they’re still being outsmarted, and people are still buying AR-15s (which can, after all, be quickly converted to full capability).

Kurt cites me and I appreciate the attention.  Let’s be clear.  When I referred to the silly modified AR-15 as an abomination, I did so because it mocked Eugene Stoner’s intent to prevent a couple about the firing hand when it is used by placing all of the force on the same axis as the chamber.  I do hate it so when Mr. Stoner turns in his grave.  I admire him so, and feel his pain when he hurts.

Maybe Kurt has something, and I don’t mind ways to insult silly rules and keep our freedoms.  But take note.  One compromise here, another there, and the anti-gun zealots won’t be mollified.  They’re just emboldened.

WRSA has a great quote by C.S. Lewis that is a must read.  Sometimes I don’t think commenters understand what’s being said.  One implies that Lewis was a conventional conservative, statists who “mean well” but ending up harming us.  Not so fast.  Read a little deeper man.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals.

Lewis isn’t pitying the statists because they’re screw-ups who are trying to do good.  He is saying that their world and life view is different, leading them to different value judgments.  Their whole concept of good and bad, right and wrong, is different that yours or mine.  Or to cite Alvin Plantinga, their very of what’s logical is different than mine because of differences in world view.  This leads to different value judgments.

Go read Mike Vanderboegh’s latest letter to the legislatures of New Jersey and Rhode Island.

The firearm owners of your respective states tell me that you are busy men and women with short attention spans so I will try to make this brief …

Some things are just priceless.

As seen at Backstreets Pub and Deli, Clemson, South Carolina.

I’ve had a Kel-Tec PMR-30 for a while now, and wanted to do a review of it.  But I had decided that I wouldn’t publish on this gun until I felt that I had a feel for what it did, why it did it, and how to operate it properly.  This is a unique gun for a number of reasons, and proper operation and maintenance isn’t intuitively obvious, even to an experienced gun owner like me.

The Kel-Tec PMR-30 is a .22 WMR (or .22 magnum) pistol that fits 30 rounds into the magazine.  It is light, very narrow framed, and odd in its parts and manipulation.

Below I show the Kel-Tec alongside a Smith & Wesson 1911 E Series pistol in order to show that the PMR-30 has a long barrel (both of these guns have a five inch barrel).  But in spite of the double stack magazine loading, the frame is still so narrow that the form and fit is different, requiring time at the range in order to accustom yourself to it.

It disassembles into an assortment of parts that looks different than any other polymer frame pistol (e.g., my XDm or my M&P), and certainly different than the 1911 pictured above.

But the PMR-30 is a finicky weapon, and one of the parts that failed on me after about two years of shooting is what I’ll call the slide retaining pin, pictured below.  The one that failed is pictured alongside the replacement from Kel-Tec, and as you can see, there is a stress concentration point in the design of the pin half way across the width of the slide.  This pin goes through the slide and holds it in place.  You can see the residual gun oil on my wife’s antique furniture, so perhaps she isn’t reading this article.

Another failure occurred about a year and a half ago with what Kel-Tec calls the “recoil spring guide lock ring.”  Once after shooting I attempted to disassemble the gun for cleaning and ended up having to force the slide off of the frame, with the result being that this ring elongated and became essentially a straight pin sitting on my kitchen floor somewhere (this happened because the ring had seized between the recoil spring guide rod and springs for some reason unknown to me).

After sweeping the kitchen, finding what was once the lock ring, and doing my own gunsmithing and reforming and reinstalling the ring, it worked fine and has worked ever since then.  The lock ring is shown below in what is admittedly a poor picture.

The PMR-30 has both a good and bad reputation within the gun community, good because it is a remarkably fun gun to shoot, and bad because it is remarkably finicky and picky.  I have suffered my share of failures to feed, failures to eject, and strange little parts failures with this gun.

That said, I have landed on what for me has made the difference in a horrible little bitch to shoot and a delightful partner at the range.  It all comes down to ammunition and magazine maintenance.

Pictured at the very top is nothing but personal defense ammunition in .22WMR.  I don’t shoot common .22 magnum ammunition any more in the gun, and I have had no failures since shooting high quality ammunition.  Rimfire ammunition is notoriously unreliable and dirty ammunition anyway and requires careful cleaning of the weapon after use.  Use of high quality ammunition makes the experience much more reliable with the PMR-30.

As for the magazine, it has a polymer follower combined with a polymer magazine frame, and the two don’t slide against each other very reliably unless I use a little oil in between the follower and magazine just prior to shooting.  I have not had any so-called “rimlock” failures, and I find that it’s relatively easy to load the ammunition.

I don’t want to repeat the other PMR-30 reviews out there, and there are a lot of them.  I also don’t want to repeat the ballistics gelatin tests of .22WMR ammunition (and there are plenty of them).  You don’t need me to perform Google and YouTube searches for you.

Basically, the .22WMR goes a full 14 inches or more into ballistics gelatin, and cavitates along the way.  The PMR-30 has a reputation for extreme muzzle flash, and I can vouch for this.  The round leaves energy in the barrel because of the slower burning rimfire load, but it still manages to achieve some 1375-1400 FPS muzzle velocity.

Readers know that I am a fan of .45 ACP, and this is my choice of personal defense weapons and ammunition.  Would I recommend carrying .22WMR for personal defense?  You’ll have to wait a moment to find that out.

The negatives of the PMR-30 include the polymer magazine, and I would willingly give up a little weight to have more reliable feeding of ammunition with a stainless steel magazine.  Also, if you are going to have reliable rimfire ammunition, you need to purchase high quality round, these being expensive enough to roughly compare to 9mm.  So if you’re going to shoot for training or carry a smaller defensive round, why would you choose .22WMR rather than 9mm?

The positives of this weapon and .22WMR are numerous.  First of all, I like the fiber optics sights.  Next, the .22WMR round has so little recoil that I can shoot it and retain or regain my sight picture with no effort.  This allows me to lay rounds on target much faster than I can with say .45 ACP or .40S&W.  I always end my range time with rapid fire of at least a couple of magazines, and no matter how much range time I put in, .45 is a hairy chested, big boy round, with a lot of powder pushing 230 grain fat boys.  That’s why I like it.  But it is difficult to maintain accuracy with rapid fire.  With the .22WMR it is effortless.  This means that for every two rounds of .45 I can put on target, I can put five or more .22WMR on target.  This means something, including in personal defense situations.

The magazine is long, and can hold up to 30 rounds.  I rarely put 30 rounds in, but whether it’s 20 or 25, this is a lot of rounds before reloading.  Would I carry .22WMR for personal defense?  I consider that to be an illegitimate question.  Hypotheticals don’t matter in personal defense.  The question is, “Have I carried the PMR-30 .22WMR for personal defense before?”  The answer is yes.

I carry different firearms at different times for different purposes and under different circumstances.  I would also recommend this round as a good backup round (say in an ankle holster).  Is it what I consider the premier personal defense round?  Of course not.  My choice for premier personal defense round would be a tossup between .357 magnum and .45 (both of which I have shot extensively).

But you may not have access to your premier round when you want it, or you may find it uncomfortable or unwieldy to carry.  I would certainly rather have this gun than not, especially given that I can lay so many rounds down range so quickly and accurately.

This gun is not a good recommendation for a single personal defense firearm for those who can only afford one weapon.  This gun is an extremely fun range toy, good for training purposes, capable of accurate rapid fire, and acceptable for personal defense in the absence of whatever you consider your premier personal defense round or as a backup weapon.

David Codrea:

Such an assumption is not backed by a ruling or determination that so-called “80 percent receivers,” heretofore acknowledged by ATF not to be firearms, are now considered unregistered guns.

EP Armory and Ares Armor is doing yeoman’s work in this struggle against the forces of darkness, and you have to respect them for their position.  Visit David’s article for the latest.

Kurt Hofmann:

Without manufacturing or selling anything that can be considered a firearm under the law, one must, according to the BATFE, still be licensed as a gun dealer before offering access to the tools, and providing instruction in the process of completing an 80% receiver. There is, of course, precisely nothing in any federal statute that would impose such a requirement–the BATFE is making it up from whole cloth.

This is what happens when a lawless man like Eric Holder supervises a lawless organization like the DOJ under Obama which manages yet another lawless sub-part like the ATF.  Laws are for little people.  And the judges are in the administration’s pocket.

Via Uncle, Only Guns and Money has endorsements for NRA board.  By the way, I recently renewed my NRA membership (yearly renewal), as I figure that it justifies my right to complain when they don’t do what I want them to do.

Mike Vanderboegh is out of surgery.  He thanks all those who prayed for him.  I did.

Finally, via the Professor, there is this:

“Given that there are tens of thousands of substations on the national grid, PG&E’s experience may not seem so alarming. But according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission study disclosed by the Journal, a few dozen of the substations are so important to the flow of energy that knocking out just nine of them would cause a metastasizing blackout that stretched from coast to coast. And replacement transformers for these substations can take more than a year to build, deliver and install, in part because most are made overseas.”

And of course, my readers already knew this.  And knew it some more.  And some more.  And more still.  I’m not bragging.  I’m just sayin’.

We’ve covered how a York County cop assumed that a slow moving seventy year old man was sweeping around and picking up a long gun to shoot him.  He shot the elderly man, who as far as I know lives today.

There is more from The State:

YORK COUNTY, SC — The York County Sheriff’s deputy who shot a 70-year-old man reaching for his cane during a traffic stop last month wept and begged God to forgive him after he fired about six shots at the man, according to the deputy’s dash cam video released Wednesday afternoon.

During a news conference at the York County Detention Center, Sheriff Bruce Bryant said deputies reviewed video of the incident “time and time and time again” and feel that Deputy Terrance Knox did nothing wrong when he fired his service weapon during a traffic stop on U.S. 321 in Clover at about 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25. He also said he does not believe the victim, Bobby Canipe of Lincolnton, N.C., did anything “intentionally” wrong when he stepped out his car and began walking toward Knox while grabbing his walking cane.

Still, Bryant said he plans to speak with the state General Assembly and state Sheriff’s Association and push for legislation requiring state and even federal highway officials to add instructions in driver’s manuals on what to do when motorists are stopped by police officers.

“We’re not making excuses in anything we’ve done,” Bryant said, “but if you’re out at night … and you’re out there by yourselves (on traffic stops), you’ve got to realize that these officers must act to protect their own safety. You do not exit your vehicle and go meet the police officer. You do not do that.”

I can remember when this was not standard procedure or regular protocol.  I can recall a time when it was the expectation that you exit your car.  I am not at all certain and it isn’t at all apparent to me that it’s safer for the LEO for you to sit in your car when stopped.  But whether this is better than what was once the expectation, the elderly man probably remembered an earlier and simpler time when he was pulled for some minor traffic violation and was asked to exit the car – or did so as routine.

Putting something about this in the driver’s manual means next to nothing as far as I’m concerned.  If LEOs and their departments can leave the bubble of their own jobs for just an instance and learn from someone else, as a professional engineer the first thing that crosses my mind for any design, piece of work, procedure or operation is “What does a failure mode and effects analysis tell us?”

To Sheriff Bryant, if it’s standard procedure that motorists stay in their vehicle, assume that it doesn’t happen.  Always.  Never assume that things go according to your own plans.  No one cares about your plans or your training or even your expectations.  If you haven’t prepared your officers for failure of motorists to follow your procedures because they don’t know them, you are failing your officers.

Let’s also observe that not only are departments failing their officers in basic schooling, they are failing officers in the very culture being encouraged within the department.  Once again we find Sheriff Bryant claiming that nothing wrong was done by the officer who shot he elderly man, and the tape makes it clear that this was a trigger happy, less than thoughtful officer who was later told by his colleague that “You done what you had to to!”

See the comments in the first article on this subject, but it simply isn’t service to society or anyone else when an officer removes his own risk by placing it on innocent people around him.  We see this all across America every day, from SWAT teams who bust down doors pointing rifles at women and children and screaming obscenities at them, to large city cops who unload 80-100 rounds at a time at assumed perpetrators, hitting innocent victims, windows, doors, and other things in the process.  We saw it recently in, of all places, Alabama, where an innocent man was gut-shot by an officer because be was carrying his wallet to the officer.

Mature, thinking men and women have been replaced by “tacticool operators” on police forces across America, using rules of engagement more liberal than what our Soldiers and Marines labored under in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the result that law enforcement is losing what Mike Vanderboegh calls the mandate of heaven.  We have more and more laws, more and more procedures, more and more “blue walls” protecting officers, and less and less respect from the people who have a healthy fear of LEOs, wondering when some frightened cop is going to unload a weapon in their direction.

To claim that the officer was merely protecting himself denies that their lives are analogous and equivalent to our own in two distinct ways.  First, it places officer safety above that of everyone around them.  Second, it ignores the SCOTUS decision in Tennessee versus Garner where the Supreme Court emphatically ruled that LEOs can shoot in self defense only, just like ordinary citizens.  But as an ordinary citizen and concealed (or here in North Carolina, open) carrier, if I unloaded my weapon at a man who was picking up his walking stick, I would be charged with (and found guilty of) second degree murder.  End of story.  This dual standard is immoral and weighs heavily on the American people.

And the sad part is that it doesn’t really have to be this way.  Becoming a law enforcement officer really can be a service to the community.  For that to happen, though, requires a complete paradigm shift in operating philosophy, management, training, and expectations, and much higher qualifications for becoming a LEO in the first place.

Don’t hold your breath for any of that to happen.

Reader Michael Gilson sends this along from Charles C.W. Cooke:

… holding that municipalities are in fact the very best places for laws to be made, tested, and obeyed; and that keeping as much as possible as local as possible is the best way of ensuring that dissenters can choose somewhere else to live without having to leave the country.

The trouble with this view in the modern area, though, is that even in a reasonably small-government place such as Arizona, the sheer size of the state has ruined much of the virtue of local variation. If we lived under only a few laws, the live-and-let-live ideal inherent to localism would be infinitely more profitable. Phoenix could have stricter smoking laws while Tempe boasted looser ones; Boston could have a sales or hotel tax while Springfield politely declined; Boise could try out a certain school curriculum and compare it to the diametrically opposed one in Meridian. But there are an awful lot of rules now, and this has effectively made local control a tool that is only truly useful in the hands of the authoritarian.

Why? Well, the reason that “lawmakers often complain that the federal government oversteps its boundaries in state matters” is that the rules that are set by the federal government ultimately afford lawmakers in the states only one option: to add to them. Which is to say that in our hyper-governed and overly centralized age, regulation works only one way. No state is able to tell Washington that it will be operating with a minimum wage that is lower than the federal one; many, however, may elect to pass higher thresholds. No state is permitted to opt out of federal regulations; every legislature, however, is free to make them stricter. And when it comes to guns, the story is no different at the state level: “municipalities’ rights” always means that the progressive town in Idaho gets to prevents its citizens from carrying firearms in the manner to which the state’s other citizens are accustomed and never means that the conservative town in Massachusetts gets to opt out of that state’s stricter rules.

Well, it depends upon a whole lot of things, including whether states have preemption laws that stop cities and townships from imposing regulations on gun carriers that would prevent them from carrying in, for example, city parks.  My state of North Carolina has just such a law.  If we didn’t my city of Charlotte (progressive as it is) would have imposed such a regulation.

My reaction to Charles’ commentary is several-fold.  First, note that I have commented that the best place for lawmaking is the state, because in order to prevent local hicks, ne’er-do-wells and criminals from acting out their Napoleon fantasies upon other men, association with the state means that … local municipalities and townships shouldn’t be able to preempt state laws.

Second, this still leave a lot of room for the state.  States can allow liberal rules for concealed carry, ensure shall-issue statutes are passed and enforced, pass open carry laws, court gun manufacturing businesses (witness South Carolina), and citizens can elect (and Governors can appoint) judges who are amenable to expunging of criminal records for crimes that would otherwise prevent ownership of firearms per form 4473.

Finally, Charles is correct on state preemption of federal laws inasmuch as states willingly comply with them.  Here I return to the issue of nullification, and point out what I have so many times before.  States have as much power over the expanding federal government as they want to have.  If they refuse to stop it, the federal leviathan will continue to grow.

The Daily Caller:

In response to months of mounting criticism from the global community over sweeping National Security Surveillance programs leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, the administration surrendered to allegations it had too much influence over the Web through ICANN, which designates the roadmap from web-connected devices to websites and servers across the globe.

“While the Obama administration says it is merely removing federal oversight of a non-profit, we should assume ICANN would end up as part of the United Nations,” Whiton said. “If the U.N. gains control what amounts to the directory and traffic signals of the Internet, it can impose whatever taxes it likes.  It likely would start with a tax on registering domains and expand from there.”

Edward Snowden’s name is mentioned in the DC article.  Forget about him for a moment.  You can blame the loss of influence over ICANN on our creepy 3-letter agencies.  It’s their fault.

But you can blame loss of control over the internet on Obama.  It’s directly his own fault.  WRSA remarks that this likely won’t end well.  No, it won’t.  A tax to the totalitarians will likely start in the form of registering domain names, but it won’t stop there.

Eventually there will be homage for domain usage paid to the gun-hating, globalist, wealthy totalitarians at the U.N., likely paid by corporations based on something like traffic, pingbacks, time on domain, page views, etc.

It will likely end in a tax for just visiting domain names paid by the user.  A final word to the corporations who are in favor of it.  Americans will only go so far in the abuse hurled at them.  If this is the straw that breaks the back of globalism, look for Americans to shut down their online banking, online purchasing, and in fact most internet visits.  It would wreak havoc on the financial system of the nation.

Corporate elitists see dollar signs rolling up in their eyeballs.  Reality has a different elixir whipped up for us.  Welcome to twenty first century dystopia.  Elections have consequences.