Who Is Leading The Fight In Virginia Against Gun Control

Rural Virginians rail against gun controls

They are in a minority

Dec 18th 2019 | STUARTS Draft

R ALPH NORTHAM, the governor of Virginia, has no program to wrest guns from their owners. His proposed gun-control measures are far more small. But the Virginians who gathered this month at a meeting of the board of supervisors of Augusta County, in the state's rural westward, were not buying that. The meeting included a vote on whether the canton should declare itself a "2nd Amendment sanctuary". It was held at a loftier school to accommodate the crowd that was expected to bear witness up. In the terminate, so many people came to protest against supposed Democratic plans to disarm them that they could not all fit in, and loudspeakers had to exist ready outside for the latecomers.

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At least 60 of Virginia's 95 counties have alleged themselves Second Subpoena sanctuaries in recent weeks. They follow counties in states such as Colorado and New Mexico. They take borrowed from the left the rhetoric of the "sanctuary cities" movement, where local governments limit their co-operation with federal immigration government in an attempt to protect illegal immigrants from deportation. But, in practice, for a county to declare itself a Second Amendment sanctuary is little more a howl of rage from rural gun owners.

In Virginia the motility began in November, when Democrats took command of both houses of the land's legislature for the showtime fourth dimension in over two decades. Gun control was a big outcome in that election. After a gunman killed 12 people in Virginia Beach in May, Mr Northam called a special legislative meeting on gun command. The Republicans, who at the fourth dimension had a majority in both chambers, put a quick end to information technology. Gun-control groups responded by pumping coin into the election. When they take office in January, the Democrats plan to introduce tighter groundwork checks and a ban on the purchase of some types of guns.

Yet what is pop in Virginia's fast-growing cities and suburbs, where well-educated and immigrant newcomers have settled, is anathema in rural areas like Augusta County. According to Terry King, a 66-year-one-time retired welder, the Democrats' measures were "opening a door you tin can't close". What started with groundwork checks would surely end with the confiscation of the guns he had been using to chase deer and rabbits since he was a child. Like others in the predominantly male person crowd, he wore an orange "Guns salvage lives" sticker on his plaid flannel shirt. The stickers had been handed out by the Virginia Citizens Defence League (VCDL), a gun-rights outfit which helped typhoon the canton's resolution.

"The problem is the people who have moved into the cities," said Gary Colvan, a 60-year-one-time onetime carpenter on disability benefits who stood in the common cold for ii hours to show his support. City dwellers did not understand, he went on, that information technology was not simply a question of culture: rural Virginians needed guns to defend their families. "Out here a constabulary officeholder can be one-half an hour away," he said. Mass shootings pained him, of course, only armed citizens fabricated America safer, not more dangerous.

Fired upwardly by organisations like the VCDL, elected officials accept exploited such feelings. Only whether they add together upwards to much more than a protest is unclear. Sanctuary cities are a applied proposal; they practice non involve breaking the law. If Second Amendment sanctuaries are to mean anything, though, local police accept to refuse to enforce state laws that local leaders retrieve are unconstitutional. Augusta Canton's sheriff, Donald Smith, told a local newspaper he would refuse to collect guns from citizens if the country asked him to. Later he moaned that the media had reported that he "wouldn't enforce the law", when actually what he meant is that "the constitution is the law". As legal defences go, it seems a shaky ane. ■

This commodity appeared in the United States department of the print edition under the headline "From our common cold dead hands"