Under the guise of “public safety,” Governor Terry McAuliffe (D) announced Monday his push for a package of gun control measures during the 2015 session of the Virginia General Assembly in his latest misguided attempt to erode the rights of law-abiding citizens.
McAuliffe’s scheme for rolling back your constitutionally protected freedoms includes:
- Attempting to reimpose the ineffective one-handgun-per-month (gun rationing) restriction that Virginia repealed in 2012.
In light of the recent Pew poll results that we reported on in Friday’s alert, it’s obvious that McAuliffe and anti-gun leader Michael Bloomberg, his political patron, are clearly out of touch with the views and priorities of ordinary Americans on this issue. Gun rationing schemes are archaic and ineffective. Like every gun control law, one-gun-a-month restrictions only burden law-abiding citizens and do absolutely nothing to reduce violent crime. Purchasers of firearms are already subject to criminal records checks, and further and arbitrary control of these legal items does nothing but unfairly burden Virginia’s law-abiding gun owners and sportsmen.
- Seeking to arbitrarily strip some 9,000 Virginia residents of their right to hold concealed handgun permits for falling behind on child-support payments and pursuing prohibitions for people convicted of certain misdemeanor crimes from possessing a firearm.
Being behind on child-support payments is not relevant to your constitutional right to defend yourself and does not indicate that you are a violent person or a danger to others. In many cases, individuals who are behind on child support payments may have simply hit on hard financial times and making it more difficult for them to defend themselves will only compound their difficulties and offer no public safety benefit. Likewise, misdemeanor offenses should not warrant the permanent loss of Second Amendment rights. No other civil right is lost in the Commonwealth for conviction of misdemeanor offenses. McAuliffe clearly wishes to treat the Right to Keep and Bear Arms as a second class civil right.
- Attempting to expand background checks.
Anyone engaged in the business of buying and selling firearms for livelihood and profit must be federally licensed as a firearm dealer (FFL) and thus there is no such thing as a “private vendor.” A gun dealer must maintain a record of every firearm received from, or transferred to, another person or dealer and any further expansions of the law will have no impact on criminal activity. Today, gun control activists like McAuliffe are trying to expand this system to all firearm transfers at gun shows, under the banner of “universal” background checks; an innocent sounding title for what should really be called “universal registration.” What they won’t tell you is that no background check system will ever be truly “universal” because criminals will not submit themselves to such system and therefore their anti-gun approach once again singles out individuals who are law-abiding citizens. The NRA opposes these misleading proposals and will work diligently to defeat this legislation.
Please contact your state legislators before the Virginia General Assembly convenes on January 14 and let them know that you oppose McAuliffe’s latest attempt to trample on the rights of Virginians.
To identify who represents you in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates, please click here.
Not only will we be busy ensuring the defeat of McAuliffe’s anti-gun agenda, but we also need to be fully engaged in the 2015 legislative elections in Virginia. All eyes will be on the Old Dominion as a run up to the important 2016 presidential election, so NRA members and gun owners need to send an unmistakably clear message. NRA-ILA’s Grassroots Division has a number of free volunteer programs to increase your activism. To learn more, visit the “Get Involved Locally” section at www.NRAILA.org. To join the National Rifle Association click here.
