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In This Issue:
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 Understanding your right to self-defense is a headline issue for all Americans. And a thorough reading of the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground laws is the place to begin. My Liberty and Freedom map shows the gun laws status in all 50 states. Were I in the relocation mode, I would concentrate only on states with Castle Doctrine protection, a favorable tax environment, and Right to Work legislation. Not surprising, you will not be relocating to a blue state, especially Massachusetts or New Jersey.
The book you require on self-defense is Deadly Force. And you will benefit greatly by having handy, before you travel, the Traveler’s Guide to the Firearm Laws of the 50 States
. My first two installments of the Armed American Family (Part I, Part II) can also help you get up to speed quickly. To help clarify the risk Americans are today facing, give a good read to my post on ex head of the CIA’s bin Laden Unit Michael Scheuer.
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As part of your family’s defense arsenal, does a tactical rifle make sense? The short answer is yes. If you are a pro, you know that a shotgun ranks number one on your list, whether it is semi-auto or pump. Shotguns, however, are the dreaded enemy of the midnight-awakened amateur. Go to the gun range and kick off a few rounds from a shotgun to see what I mean. It’s a shoulder-jolting awakening. A nice tactical rifle is also a tool best left to the pros, but for personal defense, you deserve a shot at defending your family from a late night incursion.
Just a couple of nights ago, a person I know well had to face a late night prowler for the second time in over a month. Terror is a word of understatement. And as the story was recounted to me, it’s easy to be in a bewildered state of unreadiness. I will go into the readiness subject in upcoming installments of this series. A pistol is a great option in such a situation and will also be the subject for discussion soon.
But back to the matter of a tactical rifle, your government and a number of states (Massachusetts comes quickly to mind) do not want you to be able to defend your family with one of the best home defense options available. There has been a nasty record of legislating away gun rights. I do not want to be in a position to be prevented from doing what I feel is best for the safety of my family. As such, I would concentrate on both the AR-15 and the AK-47. I own both and like them equally well. Perhaps America’s most influential Special Forces operator is Billy Waugh, who was the oldest and one of the first Americans deployed to kill bin Laden in Afghanistan post 9/11. As I have read, Billy went in with an AK-47.
As to the AR-15, I would stick with a manufacturer recommended by your local dealer. (And see TheNewRifelman.com’s buyers guide here.) There are too many great choices to get into in an introduction like this. You want to have a good working relationship with your local dealer. Colt, however, is the name that you will hear most often and has been our military’s go-to source over the years. A Colt is always a good choice. One note about ammo. You need ammo suitable for personal defense as well as for the range. I am talking two different things here. This means for personal defense you will eschew full metal jacket (FMJ) ammo.
See Part I, Part II and Part III of my Armed American Family series for more information.
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Read here from the WSJ, one man’s story of how hard it is to live in Baltimore. Jay Steinmetz is CEO of a Baltimore-based supply chain management company located 150 yards from the liquor store that was looted during last Monday’s rioting. Mr. Steinmetz, explains some of the challenges and failures he is forced to face on an ongoing basis:
City policies and procedures fail to help employers address these problems—and make them worse. When the building alarm goes off, the police charge us a fee. If the graffiti isn’t removed in a certain amount of time, we are fined. This penalize-first approach is of a piece with Baltimore’s legendary tax and regulatory burden. The real cost of these ill-conceived policies is to the community where we—and other local businesses in similar positions—might be able to hire more of those Baltimoreans who have lost hope of escaping poverty and government dependency.
The bottom line is that our modest 14,000-square-foot building is hit with $50,000 in annual property taxes. And when we refinanced our building loan in 2006, Maryland and Baltimore real-estate taxes drove up the cost of this routine financial transaction by $36,000.
Successful Baltimore-based companies like Under Armour and McCormick succeed despite the business climate, not because of it, writes Mr. Steinmetz, who also points out that “the simplest, most direct way to offer hope to discouraged people is to hire them.”
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You were never in doubt who was in charge when Pedro Martinez took to the mound for the Boston Red Sox. A review of his memoir in the WSJ:
In “Pedro,” Mr. Martinez’s memoir written with longtime Boston Herald baseball writerMichael Silverman, we learn that Mr. Martinez was fueled by rage. He hated the many scouts, managers and coaches who thought he was too small to be a starting pitcher, like Tommy Lasorda, whose Dodgers traded Mr. Martinez to the Montreal Expos in 1993. He despised coaches with rigid beliefs and anyone who required him to be punctual. (Expos pitching coach and eventual Red Sox manager Joe Kerrigan, who takes a heap of abuse from Mr. Martinez, suffered from both flaws.) “I was a born snapper,” Mr. Martinez writes. “There was nobody angrier than I was.”
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The Middle East Forum has announced Jihad Intel, a project to provide law enforcement with detailed information on violent Islamist groups. MEF writes, “ Not only does the FBI admit that the threat of ISIS attacks in the west is ‘not even close to being under control’ but there are hundreds more jihadi organizations, with new ones forming continually. Most are active on social media, recruiting globally.”
The Middle East Forum continues:
Each has its own identifying symbols. So, in response, Jihad Intel has established a public, gratis database of visual identifiers of over 125 Islamic terrorist groups – hundreds of emblems, flags, headbands, graffiti, propaganda, social media tags and other symbols used to incite Muslims to violence – with new groups and identifiers added continually.
Jihad Intel also provides background information on each terrorist organization, including a list of Western countries which have designated the organization as terrorist.
Law Enforcement and interested citizens are encouraged to join a gratis mailing list to receive intelligence bulletins on jihadist threats and information about future training seminars.
This effort also responds to the Obama administration’s removal of references to Islam from law enforcement and national security training materials. “Political correctness impedes law enforcement,” notes Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, “but we empower the police to safeguard Americans from jihadis.”
Related video:
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Pat Buchanan correctly tells Americans, “As imports substitute for U.S. production and kill U.S. jobs, traded deficits reduce a nation’s GDP. And since Bill Clinton took office, the U.S. trade deficits have totaled $11.2 trillion.”
Mr. Buchanan concludes, “In importing all those trillions in foreign-made goods, we exported the future of America’s young. Our political and corporate elites sold out working- and middle-class America to enrich the monied class.”
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You’d be smart to be nice to Millennials—this year they will outnumber Baby Boomers, which peaked at 78.8 million in 1999. In 2015, “Millennials (whom we define as between ages 18 to 34 in 2015) are projected to number 75.3 million (my emphasis), surpassing the projected 74.9 million Boomers (ages 51 to 69),” according to the Pew Research Center.
Related video:
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 Today, May 8, marks the 70th anniversary of the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Read here from Gerald Steinacher a review of German novelist and archivist Walter Kempowski’s Swansong 1945.
The majority of Germans wanted only to leave the past behind in the 1950s and ’60s. But Kempowski insisted on asking uncomfortable questions about the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. He was among the few to recognize in his work that along with German guilt there was German suffering. At the time, references to German victims were viewed as an expression of right-wing revisionism; now they are rightly understood as crucial to understanding the war. “Swansong 1945” is full of descriptions of the horrors of the final weeks of World War II, with its concentration-camp survivors staggering through the German countryside on death marches, countless suicides among soldiers and civilians, the plague of rapes by the Soviet troops intent on revenge for German atrocities, and the continuing senseless fighting.
Among the many descriptions of human misery is a diary entry written by a German doctor who was called to a German military hospital train: “no bandages, no tablets, no medication. They are calling for help from all the trucks. I am dragged with some difficulty into a cattle truck. A picture of misery: blind in both eyes, one leg amputated, shot to the lung, coughing blood, hectic appearance. A woman shot in the arm. Next to her, her child with a bullet in the back and the beginning of scarlet fever. . . . No leadership left. Like these wounded, the whole nation is being led towards the downfall, towards suffering and misery.” Hitler, meantime, was insisting to some of his entourage that the German people deserved this agony because they proved themselves too weak.
Related video:
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Stratfor called Russia’s new Armata tank “groundbreaking.” But should you fear it? The reality is more likely that in a war of two super powers, tanks of any kind are simply moving targets for laser guided munitions dropped from aircraft. The Joint Direct Attack Munition, aka JDAM, has turned America’s dumb bombs into 2,000 pound guided packages of pure destruction. Watch the annihilation of a tank in this video after hit by a JDAM guided bomb. What can slow, heavy, expensive tanks do against inexpensive and speedy drones armed with JDAMs?
Meanwhile, in Russia, the Armata is showing some signs of growing pains.
Across an ocean, and in the face of laser guided bomb technology, mountainous tanks like the Abrams and Russia’s new Armata are about as effective as the Conestoga Wagon in modern warfare.
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