While at a gun store recently, I was inundated with warnings against illegally buying a gun for someone else. The counter even had signs threatening up to 15 years in prison.
They don’t mean it. This was proven a few days beforehand, when a convicted ISIS terrorist opened fire at Old Dominion University, killing an ROTC instructor before the cadets heroically took him out. Not only had this terrorist been set free in the United States after only a brief prison term, but he had bought a stolen gun from a man whom the Biden administration had declined to charge for allegedly repeatedly and illegally buying guns for other people; instead, they had him write an apology letter. So much for 15 years.
Meanwhile, I was at the gun store because Democrats, having taken full control of the state government, are rushing through a radical gun-control agenda, including a ban on so-called “assault weapons,” by which they mean various popular semiautomatic rifles and even handguns. We may hope the courts will do their duty and strike down these blatantly unconstitutional laws, but many Virginians are stocking up in case they don’t.
A criminal who admitted to illegally buying guns (one of which showed up at a murder scene) got off with a “sorry,” but if a store were to keep selling “assault weapons” after the deadline, Democrats would undoubtedly demand the maximum penalty. Democrats are not actually trying to reduce crime or save lives with their gun-control schemes. If that were what they cared about, they would insist on enforcing the law (including existing gun laws) against actual criminals rather than finding new ways to harass ordinary, law-abiding gun owners.
Just look around Virginia. The first act of the new Democrat governor was to make the entire state a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. The far-left Fairfax County prosecutor let a particularly dangerous illegal immigrant off the hook again and again, despite police objections, until he allegedly murdered a woman. Also in Fairfax County, public schools allowed an adult illegal immigrant to enroll as a high school student; he then allegedly sexually assaulted girls at least a dozen times — and the county is refusing to hand him over to ICE to be deported.
Part of the left’s obsession with gun control is that actually dealing with crime would mean slaughtering their sacred cows. Hating on some imagined Bubba the southern hick and Chad the suburban gun collector is encouraged, but leftists are not permitted to worry about the crazy homeless guy on the subway, the panhandling junkie outside their door, or thuggish young men loitering around the corner. Expressing those concerns will get Democrats denounced as hateful bigots by their own side.
A recent New York Times piece illustrated how leftists pretend away the obvious about crime. Titled “We Study Mass Shooters. Something Terrifying Is Happening Online,” the column constantly referred to trans-identified killers by their preferred pronouns, and its search for root causes ignored that these murderers were men pretending to be women. This is a perfect example of how left-wing pieties prevent Democrats from actually facing problems and offering real solutions.
This is repeated again and again. Leftists are told not to worry about family breakdown and the evils of fatherlessness, or how mass immigration encourages factionalism and damages social trust and capital. They are not even allowed to notice when massive government spending is an obvious grift (e.g., hundreds of millions spent on homeless programs that don’t fix anything but do keep a lot of NGOs flush with cash). And when welfare money is stolen by the billions, they leap into action to defend the imported criminal gangs systematically defrauding the American government.
But Democrats are allowed to hate guns and gun owners, especially those who are white, male, and Christian. And they are allowed to redirect all their legitimate fears and concerns onto gun owners, who thereby become a scapegoat for all the problems that left-wing ideology prevents leftists from even confronting.
This was demonstrated by the far-left local prosecutor’s response to the terrorist attack at Old Dominion. He insisted, “If you’re looking for someone to blame … look at our lawmakers who don’t have the courage to implement sensible gun-control measures.” This would be too on-the-nose for satire, but it is a real example of how leftists use gun control as a scapegoat for their failures to administer justice and protect public order.
These failures happen because the left believes law and order are oppressive — well, really, that God, family, country, and practically everything is oppressive. And so they disdain enforcing laws, except against their political and cultural opponents, whom they want to harass and harm. They don’t want to put terrorists or thugs in prison or to deport illegal aliens who molest children, but they’d love an excuse to put you away on a gun law technicality.
