The State:

A bill that supporters argue would strengthen Second Amendment rights could be a disaster for the image of the Grand Strand, officials in multiple jurisdictions said.

On Tuesday, Myrtle Beach Police Chief Warren Gall said a measure under consideration in the general assembly could make law enforcement’s job more difficult, because it would be legal to carry a weapon openly as long as a user doesn’t intend to use it for an unlawful purpose. But police can only prove someone intended to use a gun unlawfully after a crime has occurred, he said.

The bill, which has passed the S.C. House of Representatives and moved to the Senate, does not require a permit for open carry.

“I don’t think they’re going to pass it this year. But imagine walking down Ocean Boulevard on Easter weekend, Fourth of July weekend, Memorial Day weekend, Labor Day weekend, and everybody down there is carrying a pistol on their side because they can,” Gall said.

Myrtle Beach has recently seen a string of shootings, many in the downtown area near or on Ocean Boulevard. Officials are grappling with multiple ways to calm the atmosphere there, but Councilwoman Mary Jeffcoat said controlling the flow of firearms could be an impossible task for local police.

“I don’t know how many people in town have guns,” she said Tuesday. “I don’t know if we’ve even guessed how many people have guns, but I bet it’s a lot of them. I’m surprised we don’t have more shootings on weekends.”

[ … ]

Chief Joseph Hill of the Horry County Police Department previously worked in Virginia, which allows open carry. He said that he hadn’t seen issues with it there, but said in his personal opinion, a proliferation of guns in public could run counter to the intended brand of the Myrtle Beach area — a family friendly resort town.

“Where are you gonna strap it when you’re in your flip flops and your shorts on the beach?” Hill asked.

“I don’t think it will work here,” he said. “I don’t have any personal objections to it other than it doesn’t fit the culture of Myrtle Beach.”

Myrtle Beach Police Chief Warren Gall may know something we don’t.  We already know how weak-kneed the South Carolina legislators are, but perhaps the chief knows something about stalling tactics.  The authors of the article let that pregnant line of questioning slip away from them.

Here’s another pregnant line of questioning.  If Chief Joseph Hill of the Horry County Police Department has worked in Virginia before, which is an open carry state, and which also has beaches, then why can’t it work at another beach like Myrtle Beach, S.C.?  And for that matter, if North Carolina is a “gold star” traditional open carry state, also with magnificent beaches like Emerald Isle and the Outer Banks, what the hell is Hill talking about?

What image are they trying to protect if crime is rampant in Myrtle Beach anyway?  Hey, if you want to handle crime in that area, why don’t y’all target those thousands of homeless, drug addled beach dwellers in between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach?  Yea, you know the ones I’m talking about, don’t you?  The ones who live just off the beach in makeshift shanties and card board boxes.

Your dirty little secret – the one you try to hide from all those Canadians and Northerners who come down to S.C. for some fun and frolic in the beach.  That is, during the times when High School students aren’t going to the beach to get inebriated and have sex with each other in hotel rooms their parents know nothing about.

Hey South Carolina LEOs!  You don’t have room to tell me anything about open carry and image.  Go fix your own damn problems and leave my rights alone.  And authors Chloe Johnson and Elizabeth Townsend, do a better job of pushing the envelope with your writing.  Why don’t you ask the hard questions?

Leo Hohmann:

Of course hate isn’t a crime.  The collectivists just want to control what people think, or at least, what they say they think.  Volition before God, and accountability for what one does, says and thinks, is replaced in this calculus with accountability before the state because the state usurps God’s authority to judge.

The collectivists want to expand it for some other reason though, to wit, they just don’t want individuals to be capable of self defense, which circumvents the process by which they adjudicate “justice,” dispense grace, and decide the future for everyone.

Yahoo:

Can you imagine a better reason not to send your children for public schooling where they will indoctrinate them in collectivist philosophy?

When children should be learning geometry, algebra, physics, chemistry and language, they worry over what color to wear today in order to stay alive.  This is disgusting and despicable in the superlative.

I believe if I was a Long Island parent I would be hunting down those MS-13 thugs and handling the problem per Herschel’s Dictum.  If the cops won’t do the job, you will just have to handle it yourselves.  In a group, if you have to.  A few well-placed .45 ACP rounds through skulls should cause the thugs to start looking over their shoulder.  Oh wait.  That’s right, you can’t legally own or carry a gun where you live.

How sad.

David Codrea:

“It’s up to us to speak up against the three most dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and media elites,” National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre told attendees at the NRA Annual Meeting.

Go see how David connects the dots.  I agree with him but connect the dots a little differently.  I think it’s literally all of the politicians, from local to state and then federal.  Oh, there are some who are good men, such as Congressman Jeff Duncan (who not coincidentally sponsored the hearing protection act).  But there just aren’t enough of them to make a difference.

It’s the political structure, which kowtows the global elitists, who invite immigrants into the country, undermines the culture and the economy, and redistributes the wealth of the middle class both upward and downward.  And this dovetails with the main point David makes, because the politicians empower the elitists to remake America in the global image.

Roger J.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
From ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, Part I, Chapter 1, ‘Arrest’:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the down-stairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney

Via Guns.com, where a robust discussion is occurring over post-Katrina gun confiscations in the comments, comes this bit of history.

THEY didn’t stop serving when hurricane Katrina trashed New Orleans, and they defied looters by turning their bar into a fortress, with a shotgun-wielding transvestite as sentry at the door.

But on Thursday, regulars at the Kajun Pub regretfully drank a final toast to their life in the Big Easy, and bowed to authorities’ demands that they turn their backs on their stinking, wounded city.

It took a heavily armed team of US marshals, who confiscated their weapons in a late-evening raid that ended with a barman in jail, to break the resistance of owner Joann Guidos.

The videos include Louisiana National Guard, local LEOs, and others.  Above we learn that some of the “others” were federal marshals.

As regular readers know, more than two years ago I had sent a FOIA request to the Louisiana National Guard to determine who issued the arming orders for the National Guardsmen on patrol through Louisiana.  To date I have heard nothing back from them even after calling the governor’s office.  My bet is that arming orders were never issued and magazines were empty.

If this is true, it means that federal agents actually conducted all of the gun confiscations.  It’s really too bad that federal agents didn’t die during those raids.  It would have brought attention to infringement of God-given rights, and it may have been the only thing that would have.

Some weapons were returned to owners rusted and broken, others never got their weapons back.  All of them were left defenseless in the face of armed looters by men who don’t care and would just as soon see the people perish as to recognize their rights.  “Just obeying orders, ma’am.  Just obeying orders, sir.”

Never forget.  Never let it happen to you.  The federal agents confiscating weapons were criminals, conducting illegal search and seizures, guilty of theft, assault with deadly weapons, harassment, trespassing, and breaking and entering.  Each and every one of them deserved to die.  For the record, declaring “martial law” means nothing concerning your constitutionally recognized rights.  It is precisely in times of crisis that your rights matter the most, and the founders didn’t exempt hard times for the recognition of rights.

The Post And Courier:

Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen wants to stop the General Assembly from enacting a law that would allow gun owners to carry their guns concealed or openly without having to get a permit, and he’s enlisted area residents to help him get the job done.

[ … ]

Mullen says the law would make it more difficult for law enforcement employees to do their jobs since they wouldn’t be able to question people only for openly carrying their weapons.

“People are going to be calling us and wanting us to intervene, and we’re going to have to tell them because of the law, we’re not able to do that,” he said …

“At least we know when were dealing with a concealed-weapons carrier, they’ve gone through a background check and gone through training,” he said. “And it creates another opportunity for small situations, verbal altercations or minor disagreements, to lead to serious injuries or even death.”

Dramatic, yes?  Altercations, even death!  The problem is that he’s lying.  As a long time resident of a “Gold Star” traditional open carry state, I know that nothing of the sort happens.  And chief Mullen knows all of this too, but like LEOs everywhere, he wants to maintain control and the revenue stream that comes from gun permitting.  Mullen shouldn’t look at it as if he isn’t “able to intervene.”  He should look at it as an opportunity to educate the public on the rights of citizens of South Carolina.  He would rather intervene, since he is an old school collectivist.

Next up, Alabama LEOs.

Treadaway said an example of how the permit requirement is an important tool for law enforcement came last week when Birmingham police stopped a pickup with no headlights on. The officers noticed an AR-15 on the back seat, which was not illegal, Treadaway said. The driver admitted to having a pistol in the truck and did not have a permit for it.

That led to his arrest and a search of the truck, which turned up two pipe bombs and illegal drugs, Treadaway said.

“That’s a prime example that if this law passed, the concerns of law enforcement is that tool would be taken away,” Treadaway said.

It all sounds so dramatic, yes?  Except it wasn’t the lack of a permit that tipped the LEOs off to something else in the automobile, it was the willingness of the perpetrator to confess on the spot that he had a pistol in the truck.  Actually, if he had run his headlights, he never would have been stopped to begin with, so none of this has anything to do with permitting or open carry.

You can take it as an article of faith, that when asked about constitutional carry, LEOs everywhere will come up with the most dramatic excuses for why it’s a bad thing and will lead to blood in the streets and difficulty to maintain law and order.

Except that the history of open carry states shows that they’re lying every time.  So why ask them at all?  Ignore the LEOs when considering the rights of citizens.  After all, they aren’t constitutional scholars.

WCSC:

CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) – A Lowcountry police department has formally taken a stance on a Senate bill which, if passed, would allow anyone who can legally purchase a gun to carry it in the state openly or concealed.

The Charleston Police Department tweeted an update on its Twitter account Monday night sharing the department’s opinion on Senate bill S. 449 reading in part:

“Please understand what this bill creates – the ability for anyone who can legally purchase a firearm, many who have not completed a background check to determine whether or not they are prohibited purchasers due to the location and manner of the transfer or received any type of training, to walk our streets and neighborhoods with a handgun on their hip, in a bag, or under their jacket without any review or training.”

This may be the most mangled use of the English language I’ve ever witnessed.  I’m still actually having trouble with it, but together we’ll try to parse it.

First of all, there is the issue of the choice of the word “ability.”  This is odd, and the department – whomever that is, perhaps the chief of police, perhaps his secretary, perhaps an attorney – may have meant “legality,” or “legal viability,” or “legal ability.”  Anyone who has the money has the ability to purchase virtually anything.  In other words, the lack of some sort of state approval means nothing whatsoever concerning whether a person can do something, only whether a person may do something under the law.

Second, if we can get past the word ability, the phrase “who can legally purchase a firearm” says more than they want it to say and destroys their argument (if you can call this an argument at all).  It’s problematic because they acquiesce to the notion that the user or owner of the firearm has obtained the firearm legally (via form 4473) by stipulating so in the prefatory remarks, and then demur by saying that the owner or user may not be a legal firearm owner because, and I quote, “many who (sic) have not completed a background check to determine whether or not they are prohibited purchasers due to the location and manner of the transfer or received any type of training …”

They should have said “many of whom.”  Actually, they shouldn’t have said anything at all.  This is yet another oddball statement.  A “prohibited purchaser” cannot legally purchase a firearm via form 4473 (not that I agree with federal gun laws, I’m just attempting to logically parse this screwed up statement).

Person-to-person transfers are still legal in South Carolina, requiring neither form 4473 nor CLEO approval, nothing about that changes with this bill, and what all of this has to do with constitutional versus permitted carry is not addressed in this confusing statement.  Presumably the chief was referring to the fact that the CLEO permitting process will not have been followed for carry of the firearm (purchase of a firearm doesn’t require CLEO approval, but carry of a firearm [legally] does require CLEO approval).

But that’s what this debate is all about.  No one is denying that the bill, if passed would annul the requirement for CLEO approval for permitting to carry.  That’s its virtue, not its cunning.  Additionally, someone may walk around with a gun in a pocket, bag, on their hip or under a jacket anyway without CLEO approval.  If it isn’t seen, LEOs wouldn’t have opportunity to stop them since all detainments must be a so-called “Terry Stop.”  CLEO approval isn’t stopping criminals from carrying weapons.

The title of the article says that the Charleston Police Department weighs in on open carry, but the objections so far have to do only with bypassing the CLEO process for concealed carry and weapons transfers.  So it’s possible that the author of the short article didn’t even understand the issue.  Or it’s possible that the article is mistitled since the proposed law both bypasses the CLEO permitting process and legalizes open carry at one time.

Perhaps the chief has taught his officers that if someone isn’t carrying openly, the person isn’t carrying at all.  But wait, open carry is still illegal in South Carolina, and I doubt that officers in his employ assume that criminals aren’t carrying firearms and only permitted carriers have weapons.  We are left to wonder if the chief cares to weigh in on open carry.  Then again, let’s hope not.  His statement might be even worse than this one.  At least if he does issue such a statement, he should take a grammar course first, and perhaps a suitable course in logic and rhetoric.

Prior:

Constitutional Carry Update In Alabama, Texas And South Carolina

Constitutional Carry Passes Alabama Senate, Setting Example For The South Carolina Senate

South Carolina Police And Lawmakers Are In A “Shootout” Over Carrying Guns

Laws Against Open Carry Are For The Purpose Of Shaming Gun Owners

South Carolina Senate Hearings For New Gun Laws

As reader TheAlaskan observed, “Those who demand that you surrender your arms, are planning on keeping theirs.”  Indeed, and they intend to use them too.

In Venezuela, the commercial sale and ownership of firearms has been illegal since 2012.  Gun confiscations eventually occurred, and now the socialist dictator is arming his allies in order to maintain power.

You know what’s next, don’t you?  If not, take a look at this Instagram video of Venezuela police gangs stealing, looting and abusing citizens of Venezuela.

Could it be any other way for the statists?

SB-Tactical:

SB Tactical™, inventors and manufacturers of the Pistol Stabilizing Brace®, is excited to announce that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) has issued SB Tactical a reversal letter containing a sensible clarification of the Bureau’s position on the lawful use of SB Tactical braces.

The new clarification of opinion letter states, “an NFA firearm has not necessarily been made when the device is not reconfigured for use as a shoulder stock – even if the attached firearm happens to be fired from the shoulder. To the extent that the January 2015 Open Letter implied or has been construed to hold that incidental, sporadic, or situational “use” of an arm-brace (in its original approved configuration) equipped firearm from a firing position at or near the shoulder was sufficient to constitute “redesign,” such interpretations are incorrect and not consistent with ATF’s interpretation of the statute or the manner in which it has historically been enforced.”

SB Tactical, along with the law offices of Mark Barnes & Associates, have worked tirelessly for more than two years to correct what they believed to be an inaccurate interpretation of “redesign,” related to the Pistol Stabilizing Brace. “It has always been our belief that the addition of our Pistol Stabilizing Brace benefits shooters, both disabled and able-bodied, and that neither strapping it to your arm nor shouldering a brace equipped pistol would constitute ‘redesign’ of a pistol to a NFA firearm”, said Alex Bosco, inventor, founder and CEO of SB Tactical.

Good.  As I’ve observed before, when your life or the life of a loved ones is in danger, how you choose to present and deploy your weapons should be up to you depending upon the circumstances and your need of the moment.

Furthermore, this is good news with regards to range time.  No one at a range will be able to tell you that practice with a firearm like this shouldered to fire is unlawful use of the firearm.  You should train the way you intend to use your weapons, and if one possible use of a particular weapon is to shoulder the end of the buffer tube, then so be it.

The ATF isn’t defending your home, and didn’t take an oath to protect, provide for and honor your spouse.  You did.  No one wants to run afoul of unnecessary and ridiculous rules and needlessly cause trouble in the course of his preparations and training.