How do you say “feel-good gun control” err we mean “common sense gun safety proposal” in Dutch? The video from Capandball, a Hungarian black powder shooter and Vlogger, talks about the folly of regulating smoke poles due to terrorists.

Besides further changes in magazine limits, requirements to join shooting clubs and restrictions on blank firing guns, some in the European Union want to lower the boom on replicas and black powder as well.

The Dutch Presidency, a 20 member assembly from the Netherlands that currently chair the EU ministerial councils, moved earlier this month to drastically change the alliance’s Firearms Directive in response to terrorist incidents in Europe including attacks in Paris and Brussels.

Among the changes would be to deactivate historical guns held in museums across Europe, ban the production of replica firearms to include reproductions of antique weapons, remove the entire class of Category D guns which includes most muzzleloaders, move single-shot long breechloaders with smoothbore barrels to a higher level of control, and other efforts.

The European Federation of Associations for Hunting and Conservation (FACE), the EUs most outspoken gun rights group, called the move draconian.

“Who will believe that the removal of the Category D and the prohibition of reproductions of antique firearms will effectively contribute to the fight against organized crime and terrorism?” reads a statement from the group. “No report highlighted that reproduction of antique  firearms constitute a danger for security and society. Criminals using Kalashnikovs and arms dealers who supply terrorists on the black market will not be affected by these new  constraints which exclusively hit honest citizens, legal owners of single-shot reproductions of antique firearms.”

As noted by the Prague Daily Monitor, Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka joined representatives from Slovakia, Poland, Austria and Switzerland in opposing the changes.

“The Czech Republic is very likely to express its negative position at the meeting of the council [for justice and home affairs] on June 10,” Sobotka said.

Besides the Dutch, the changes are supported by Croatia, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

Source: http://www.guns.com/2016/06/08/then-they-came-for-the-muzzleloaders-eu-moves-to-regulate-black-powder-guns-due-to-terrorism-video/

Paul Crawley, WXIA

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (WXIA) -- It's one of Georgia's most famous landmarks and the largest carving of its type in the world.

But now an Atlanta man wants the Confederate Memorial relief on Stone Mountain removed.

"It's almost like a black eye or an embarrassing smudge on our culture," McCartney Forde told 11Alive News on Monday.

That's how Forde feels about the 2 football field-wide carving of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson that towers 400 feet above the mountain's base.

from WXIA

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Confederate Memorial Day was marked Thursday in the city where the Civil War began with a somber, reflective ceremony in which dozens of descendants of Southern troops described where their ancestors fought and many of them died.

About 100 people gathered on Charleston’s Battery as a wreath was placed at a monument dedicated to the Southern defenders of Charleston. From that spot, one can look across Charleston Harbor to Fort Sumter where the April, 1861 bombardment of the Union-held fort plunged the nation into Civil War.

Those attending, many of them members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, wore not Confederate gray but seersucker suits and straw hats under the warm May sun. About three dozen walked to the front of the gathering one at a time and then, some choking with emotion, gave the names, ranks and units of their ancestors and where they fought.

The group then sang “Dixie” and a group of Confederate re-enactors fired a cannon at nearby White Point Garden.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
By TBO.COM | Staff 

from Tampa Bay Online

Residents of a small North Carolina town are at odds over whether to replace a damaged statue that honors Confederate war veterans. WSJ's Cameron McWhirter reports from Reidsville, North Carolina.

By CAMERON MCWHIRTER

REIDSVILLE, N.C.—Mark Anthony Vincent says he was tired and distracted as he drove his van through this city early one morning last May to deliver auto parts, and dozed off. Mr. Vincent says he looked at his GPS just before 4:47 a.m., when the 1999 Chevrolet ran off the road and slammed into a 101-year-old Confederate veterans monument in Reidsville's central roundabout.

The van struck the 32-foot-tall granite pillar, jostling a 6-foot marble statue of a Confederate soldier, which toppled onto the van and broke into at least 10 pieces. The soldier's head slammed through the van's hood, crushing the engine.

"He still had some fight in him," a shaken Mr. Vincent told a television news crew at the time.

The monument's destruction shocked this factory town of 15,000, once called "Lucky City" because it was a major producer of Lucky Strike cigarettes, owned by the former American Tobacco Co.

It also has ignited a civil war of sorts.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Sons of Confederate Veterans Protester from Jasper,GA at Plant Wansley (11/7/11)
from HeardCitizen.com on Vimeo.

Steve Monk, an advocate for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, speaks to HeardCitizen.com about the reasons he is protesting outside the gates of the Georgia Power owned Plant Wansley on Monday afternoon, November 7, 2011. Plant Wansley is located in Heard and Carroll Counties in West Central Georgia. Georgoia Power had removed Confederate Flags from the graves of several Civil War soldiers. The flags were ultimately returned to family members and restored to the grave site. 

The Civil War at 150: The Past In The Present?, David W. Blight, Kansas City Star, October 3, 2011.

Why can’t we just get over the Civil War in America? Why does it still have such a hold on our imagination, on our political habits and rhetoric, on the stories through which we define ourselves as a people and a nation? Why is the Confederacy, a mere four-year experiment in revolution to preserve a slave holding society, still so interesting to so many people? Haven’t we had at least two “Reconstructions” — the first of the 1860s and ’70s, the second the civil rights movement a century later — to solve those issues at the war’s roots?

As we commemorate this most pivotal and transforming event — at the same time the country descends into some of the worst political polarization in modern times — it is important to visit these questions. The stakes are very high. And, ideologically, many of the issues of 2011 are much the same as in 1861. Given the hold the tea party seems to have on the base of the Republican Party, we should take notice when some in the group invoke the Confederate constitution as a model for anti-tax, anti-centralization libertarianism.

First, it was modeled closely after the U.S. Constitution. Second, its advocates may need a reminder of just how desperately the Jefferson Davis administration struggled to forge a centralized government out of the chaos of war, jealous localism, states’ rights and homegrown greed and individualism. Indeed, yesterday’s secessionists and today’s nullifiers have much in common. Both are distinct minorities who have suddenly seized an inordinate degree of power.

Continue reading : Civil War Politics, The Tea Party, And The Decisions That Await Us from the Kansas City Star