Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA)
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, left, accompanied by his wife, Pam, speaks during a news conference in the Governor’s Mansion in Richmond, Va., on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2019. Resisting widespread calls for his resignation, Northam on Saturday vowed to remain in office after disavowing a racist photograph that appeared under his name in his 1984 medical school yearbook. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Virginia’s gun owners will now be forced to stay on their toes as its Democratic government has announced it’s going to take the war on guns into overdrive within the state.
According to the Washington Post, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday that now that Virginia’s state government is under complete Democrat control for the first time in a generation, they’re going to take the heavy stick they were just given and begin beating gun owners over the head with it:
Regarding gun control, he referred to eight “common-sense” bills he proposed for the special legislative session he convened in July, in the aftermath of a mass shooting in Virginia Beach on May 31. Republicans who controlled the General Assembly shut down that session after 90 minutes — sending all of the bills to the crime commission and promising to reconvene after the election.
Northam mentioned universal background checks, banning the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, restoring the law that limits purchases to one gun a month, and a red flag law that would empower a court to temporarily remove a gun from a person deemed to be a risk to himself or others.
That’s definitely bad, but it’s far from the worst part. Reporters asked Northam if he was going to begin taking “assault weapons” from gun owners, and Northam’s answer was straight out of an Orwell novel.
“That’s something I’m working [on] with our secretary of public safety,” he said. “I’ll work with the gun violence activists, and we’ll work [on] that. I don’t have a definitive plan today.”
How Northam plans to strip legal gun owners of their firearms wasn’t exactly discussed in detail. In fact, expressing details wasn’t exactly high on the priority list, which can tell you a lot of things already. Whatever is going to happen, Virginia’s Democrats don’t want the people prepared for it.
What’s more, Northam, like every other Democrat, is using nebulous language about what guns he plans on taking. There is no such thing as an “assault weapon,” at least as far as precise models of firearms go. He could take the language and run with it to mean any gun that looks remotely scary.
Most importantly, it’s unclear how he’s going to be able to pass legislation that would allow for the confiscation of firearms from legal gun owners, much less enact a red flag law. The Constitutional problems he’d run into would prevent quite a few of the laws he’d like to pass, and even if he did manage to pass bans and confiscation laws, he’d be fighting legal battles in the Supreme Court for a long time.
I’m not saying that to make it seem like gun owners shouldn’t worry as much. They absolutely should. I am saying that there is going to be a legal war erupting around Virginia soon, and every gun owner should lend their help in fighting in it.