From Reader Mike C comes this email:
Like many Virginia voters, the speed at which the combination of the legislators and governor moving to the Democrat side and the pending legislative session yielding draconian gun laws and possible door to door confiscation caught me by surprise. Politics up to this point has been a bit of a genteel affair, with the Dems and Reps making small changes one way or another and the pendulum swinging slowly this way and that.. until now. As I’m sure you have heard, it’s about to get real here.
So to summarize what I’m sure you already know, they are set to pass gun control laws outlawing evil black guns, any pistol that holds more than 9 rounds, any shotgun that holds more than 6, and similar magazine restrictions on rifles. Apparently it will be a felony to own any of these. Most counties including mine have passed resolutions saying they will not enforce such laws. However, for my purple county, the board of supervisors will turn into a Democrat majority in January and that resolution will be overturned. Since the new laws will not grandfather in previously purchased firearms, it will have the immediate effect of making millions of lawful gun owners instant felons. If that doesn’t make your blood run cold, nothing will.
How does this affect me personally? Well, as perhaps you may recall from previous discussions, I have never liked pistols much as I never was very good with one, even though I was a competitive rifle shooter as a young man and qualified and carried a 1911 in the army. That, coupled with living and working in the pastoral suburbs means I never felt the need to carry and don’t own a pistol, evil large mag or otherwise. I do own a few bolt action classics in various calibers and a few single shot shotguns that for now are safe from prosecution. Having carried and disliked the M16 during my Army days, I am not a fan of nor own any evil black rifles. However I do have what you would call a standard plinking tool, a semi-auto .22 whose round count in the tube capacity will run afoul of the new law and make me a felon.
While I can stow my felony-inducing .22 with relatives in another state, the question is, should I, and what should / can I do to protect myself and my family from this tyranny where millions of Virginians will now face a midnight knock on the door because some neighborhood informant has clued the Stasi in on our felony possession of a semi-auto .22 (which frankly doesn’t shoot that well, is a pain to clean, an antique, and frequently jams and misfires)?
The rebel in me wants to go to the final gun show of the year (or ever) this coming weekend and purchase a evil black rifle lower, just so I can show solidarity with the black rifle brethren. What if a lot of people did that? On one hand, it would definitely send a message. On the other hand prosecutors across the state would rejoice, because they would significantly increase their conviction rates due to better leverage in plea bargain negotiations.
A friend tells me there is going to be a rally on the 20th in Richmond to let the legislators know how we feel. Having gone that route with the tea party on the Mall and seen it have no real effect, and knowing the new legislators and governor are sufficiently bought and paid for, I know such demonstrations are really just pissing in the wind. I would not be surprised to see Antifa and even neo-Nazis show up just to make the legitimate protesters look like kooks for the media. Worse yet, just like the tea party and anti-abortion yearly protest, these demonstrations will probably be ignored by the media, no matter how many people show up.
The question still remains though, what is the right thing for an average guy to do? It’s all well and good to speak of pitchforks, ropes, and trees, but having faced down apartheid, you know better than most how quickly and devastatingly resistance can degenerate into Sarah Host’s dystopian “blood in the streets”. I fear for my state in this. Worse, the police here will be faced with millions of newly minted, hostile felons. What then? On top of that, with so many new “criminal class” citizens, what will be the real criminal class response against the weakened sheep and hunkered down police?
The best case here is that the police will take no positive action as a result of this new legislation. While there will be millions of new de facto felons, they will only be changed incidental to detainment for other reasons – traffic stops, self defense, 911 calls, divorce fights, and Swatting incidents among them. The only real recourse I see for us is to try to do something about our severely compromised voting system and hope that enough Virginians remain enraged enough to overcome the fraud factor in a year or two. Or move, and a few years after that pen a heart rendering ode entitled “Let Virginia Sink”.
Your thoughts?
Let’s address the low-hanging fruit here first. My advice: ditch the unreliable old .22 rifle and get yourself a new one — say a Ruger 10/22 — which has the advantage of being so popular, not to say ubiquitous and which means that (bet on it) that any future legislation will “grandfather” ownership of said rifles. Also, get a boatload of spare 10-round mags (5-10 would be a good benchmark) in case your politicians ban future sales thereof. Also, at least a couple thousand rounds of .22 LR in case the fuckers ban purchase of “large” quantities.
In that same vein, let’s talk about getting an Evil Black Rifle (EBR). Don’t get an AR-15 lower, because these bastards will just include them in the ban and worse, you won’t have a usable gun. Get a working gun — AR or AK — and if you want to circumvent a magazine ban, get an SKS. I know, it only has a 5 10-round mag, but you would be surprised how quickly you can load 7.62x39mm rounds with a stripper clip. Ordinarily, I’d recommend getting a Russian one (as below, with integrated eeeevil bayonet), and not the non-Chinese Type 56 SKS, but if needs must… [sigh]
What’s more important is to lay in not a boatload, but a Carnival Cruise liner-sized load of ammo.
Here’s why I want you to get an EBR: the more EBRs that are out there in citizens’ hands, the more difficult it would be to pass legislation against them, and even greater the difficulty in confiscation thereof.
If you are worried about doing this (and I can quite understand your trepidation, btw), then you must get a semi-auto 12- or 20-gauge shotgun, which are pretty much un-bannable because of their ubiquity. I’ll leave the brand choice up to you, but if there’s a money constraint, Mossberg makes an excellent line of budget guns, such as the 930 or SA-20, for around $500. (Get the wooden-stocked “sporting” model so it looks less scawwwy to the gun-grabbing assholes.)
Now all that said, I think the Bastard Gun Controllers [some redundancy] may find it a little more difficult to start their little confiscation reindeer games, if people like this are to be believed (emphasis added):
If the Virginia legislators want to push this issue, it could get ugly. And oh, by the way, plan on seeing the vast majority of the Virginia National Guard become Conscientious Objectors. It will be really hard for them to arrest cops and confiscate guns when none of them will carry the necessary arms to enforce said arrests and confiscations.
How do I know this? I am one of them and will be one of the first to lay down my gun and walk away. I will not be a pawn in a tyrannical game of human chess. Neither will most of the men and women I serve with.
Bravo, my son. Let’s hope it never gets this far.
And for the rest of us, who live in the United States and not Virginia, California, New York or Illinois, etc., we need to be on our guard, constantly, lest our own states start moving in this direction. With the constant invasion of fucking socialists from so-called “liberal” states, what’s happened in Virginia could happen to any of us.
Let’s start talking to our local pols, and remind all of them exactly what they’re up against if they even begin to think of cute little stunts like Virginia’s pols are planning to enact. Start with the city and town politicians, move out to the county government, and make sure they and the state legislators know exactly where they stand. Let’s get into their faces first.
And FFS, join your local 2A organization like the TSRA and such, no matter how ineffectual you think they are, because if their numbers are suddenly swelled by a hundred thousand new (and more fervent) 2A supporters, they will have to change too. Never mind the NRA for the moment — because this battleground is going to be in your area and in your face, not at the national level; and to be honest, the NRA is often worse than useless in any kind of local activism.
