Tear gas? That's so twentieth century!

Ohio author Mike Ferner catalogs for LewRockwell.org an impressive (and sickening) list of tools available to police agencies to "control" crowds peacefully protesting against the Feds. A few of them were used in Pittsburgh during the recent G-20 conference (the same occasion President Obama used to advise us in Ohio that recovery will take 20 more years).

Some of the tools include:
- Bean bags fired from shotguns
- Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD). This is mounted on the turret of an armored personnel carrier. It blasts a "shrill, piercing noise like a high-pitched siron on steroids." It is so irritating that people are soon swept off the streets. Mr. Ferner describes the police as being in "full riot gear looking like darkly threatening Michelin Men, made for a scene out of a movie you didn’t want to be in."
- The "Active Denial System" that emits a high-energy beam to create an intolerable sensation like that of a hot iron pressed against the skin.
- The "puke ray", which distributes light in colors and rhythm in such a way as to temporarily blind and disorient the victim, then make him nauseous.
- "Spider silk", a means for entangling people.
- The piezer, which 'uses piezoelectric crystals that produce voltage when they are compressed. A 12-gauge shotgun fires the crystals, stunning the target with an electric shock on impact. Lynntech of College Station, Texas, is developing a projectile Taser that can be fired from a shotgun or 40-mm grenade launcher to increase greatly the weapon's current range of seven meters."
- The antidepressants Prozac and Zoloft, "identified by the Penn State College of Medicine and the university's Applied Research Lab for further study as "non-lethal calmatives." These '...are found to be highly effective for numerous behavioral disturbances encountered in situations where a deployment of a non-lethal technique must be considered.' ...New compounds under development (WO 09500194) are being designed with a faster onset of action."

It appears that the right to "peacefully assemble for the redress of grievances" has been redacted out of the First Amendment.