Virginia Illustrates Insidious Anti-Gun Threat

I’ve joked before that Virginia’s politics swing back and forth like an unlatched screen door in a hurricane. From red to blue to red to blue, all so fast it makes your head spin.

But last year’s elections opened the door for a lot of troubling things in Virginia, up to and including their redistricting plan that seeks to essentially wipe out Republican representation from the state, and with it, support for gun rights. Sure, there’s one district, but only because there was no way to gerrymander the state badly enough to make it solid blue.

However, Virginia reveals an insidious threat because the state is too purple to suddenly swing this far left.

Progressive groups are behind a wave of tougher restrictions on firearms, wielding a quiet power that Second Amendment proponents worry could unravel gun rights in friendly territory.

Earlier this month, Virginia lawmakers sent a spate of gun bills tightening firearms restrictions to Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s (D-VA) desk. It’s a development fueled by Moms Demand Action, and one that one of the country’s most prominent pro-gun rights organizations fears foreshadows things to come in other purple states.

“Virginia is a purple state, and so having this sweeping, massive gun control package in the state that’s got a lot of gun owners, to see that happen and happen so rapidly should really be alarming to everybody in this country,” National Rifle Association’s Director of Public Affairs, Justin Davis, told the Washington Examiner.

“It’s really just a blueprint of what’s to come in this country. This is a trial balloon for the midterm elections,” he said. “They’re seeing what they can pass in a purple state? What is the backlash from that? And how do people react?”…

Davis said many such state races can be “so easily” flipped with small “injections“ of cash. Due to progressive activism, every state is “ripe for flipping at any time,” he said.

“To think that the stuff they’re pushing here is happening in Virginia should wake up every single purple state in the country, any place that is, it was in the realm of what a ‘moderate state’ is that there’s a very well-trained, very concerted effort to get progressives elected positions,” Davis said. “There are people who literally look at these races, race by race, and say, ‘How do we make sure that we can flip this for a broader scale, to flip this state to pass these same leftist laws?’”

Groups like Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety are specifically named for injecting a significant amount of cash into the race, and the truth of the matter is that these groups will run ads that feature policies other than gun control, usually pretty progressive ones.

So what happens is that for a few million dollars, they can push a candidate who might not appear all that bad in the grand scheme of things–remember, Spanberger tried to position herself as a moderate, and a lot of people listened–only to take office and start trying to run the table with things like gun control.

Virginia is a purple state, but the current agenda in Richmond looks like something you’d expect in California.

No, it doesn’t help that Virginia governors can only serve a single term at a time, thus meaning they never have to worry about re-election. That means they can trot out their agenda on day one, and other than the midterms, there’s nothing stopping them from going as far left or right as they’d like. In this case, it means trotting out the most ridiculous anti-gun agenda you’re ever going to see in any part of the South.

This is something we need to be on guard against and work to counter if we don’t want to see our rights destroyed at the state level.