I get that Virginia is right there along the District of Columbia border, and that means a lot of people who work inside the beltway live in the Old Dominion State and favor all of the policies popular among the self-appointed urban elite, but it used to be that there was at least some line of sanity throughout the rest of the state.
You’d think the military population alone would drive at least some of that sanity, even if the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines vote in their home districts. After all, the jobs on military bases are a thing.
However, one would be wrong to think so, as we can see.
Instead, the descent into madness has truly begun.
Democratic lawmakers on Monday advanced a sweeping slate of gun safety proposals — many of them previously vetoed by former Gov. Glenn Youngkin — as they test whether Virginia’s new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, will take a more favorable view of firearm restrictions.
Over nearly four hours, the Democratic-led Senate Courts of Justice Committee approved more than half a dozen bills tightening rules on assault-style firearms, gun storage, concealed carry reciprocity, ghost guns and weapons in public spaces, while rejecting the lone Republican proposal that would have increased mandatory minimum sentences for repeat firearm offenses.
All of the votes fell along party lines.
The meeting came exactly one week after hundreds of gun rights activists gathered around Capitol Square on Martin Luther King Jr. Day for the annual Lobby Day rally, where speakers warned that Democrats were reviving an aggressive gun control agenda after several years of vetoes under Youngkin.
That rally drew a larger crowd than recent years, reflecting heightened tension as Democrats now control the governor’s office and both chambers of the General Assembly.
Because of time constraints, the committee did not take up an additional package of gun-related proposals that remain pending.
Among the bills is a mandatory storage bill, which the recent shooting of a teacher, followed by the prosecution of the shooter’s mother, shows the state didn’t need. Another is a bill criminalizing being the victim of a gun theft when the firearm was in your car.
In fact, every bill advanced that would create more difficulty for lawful gun owners, but they voted down the bill that would increase minimum sentences for repeat offenders who use illegal firearms over and over again.
If that doesn’t make it clear that this isn’t about crime, I don’t know what else will.
As it stands, Democrats have enough votes to probably pass all of this, and there’s no chance in hell that now Gov. Spanberger won’t sign these bills into law. In one year, Virginia is likely to become one of the most anti-gun states in the nation.
And there will be more coming, to be sure.
The vain hope that they’d be too preoccupied to worry about gun control can now be dismissed as a fever dream of the eternal optimists, not that anyone took the hope that seriously.
What worries me is what else is coming down the line. If these measures are what they got to, what did they leave on the agenda for when the bills get finally introduced?
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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