Ralph Northam’s Losing Battle on Sanctuaries

Ralph Northam is about to make the biggest tactical mistake in Virginia since Cornwallis decided to park his army at Yorktown. With his attempt to force local commonwealth’s attorneys and sheriffs in Second Amendment sanctuaries to enforce his unconstitutional gun laws, Governor Northam is setting himself up for a catastrophic failure. In fact, there’s no way for Northam to win the fight he seems intent on picking with Virginia gun owners and Second Amendment sanctuaries

The governor isn’t being helped by fellow Democrats such as U.S. congressman Donald McEachin, who said the governor should call out the National Guard to enforce the law, or Attorney General Mark Herring, who blithely says he expects that the laws will be followed once they’re on the books.

There are also Democrats, such as Delegate David Toscano, who have been comparing the Second Amendment–sanctuary movement to the Massive Resistance movement that unfolded in Virginia in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Massive Resistance came about after Democratic governor Thomas B. Stanley organized a state-level opposition movement to the integration of public schools in Virginia in the late 1950s. To compare it to today’s Second Amendment–sanctuary movement is to compare apples and oranges on a couple of different levels.

First of all, the Second Amendment–sanctuary movement is morally just, unlike the Massive Resistance movement of the late ’50s and early ’60s. The Second Amendment–sanctuary movement isn’t about curtailing rights, but rather about protecting their free exercise.

Practically speaking, Massive Resistance was a top-down movement, spearheaded by U.S. senator Harry Byrd and his fellow Democrats in the governor’s mansion and Virginia’s attorney general’s office. The Second Amendment–sanctuary movement, on the other hand, is a hyper-local grassroots movement that has no leader, though state-level Second Amendment groups are doing a good job of informing folks where meetings are taking place and even providing curious supervisors with examples of Second Amendment–sanctuary resolutions that have been approved elsewhere. Thousands of people show up at these board-of-supervisors meetings, and not because Philip Van Cleave or Cam Edwards or Nick Freitas or anyone else told them to be there. They’re showing up because their neighbor told them about the meeting, or they saw something on Facebook. They’re showing up and speaking out because they care.

Ultimately, it’s the people in these Second Amendment–sanctuary communities who are the last line of defense against the infringement of their rights, but thankfully we have several other defensive options at our disposal. We can even thank today’s Virginia Democrats for providing a blueprint to follow. Call it passive resistance, not Massive Resistance.