Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has signed legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain semi-automatic firearms, prompting immediate lawsuits from gun-rights groups.
The limits on “ assault firearms,” as they are described by the legislation, are among two dozen new restrictions and regulations on guns enacted by the Democratic governor in her first few months in office. That marks a sharp policy reversal from her Republican predecessor, who had vetoed many similar measures.
“Firearms designed to inflict maximum casualties do not belong on our streets,” Spanberger said in a statement Friday. “We are taking this step to protect families and support the law enforcement officers who work every day to keep our communities safe.”
The new gun restrictions move Virginia closer to the likes of California, Illinois and New York, which similarly have full Democratic control of their legislatures and governors’ offices. They also highlight a continued national divide on gun policy, as various Republican-led states have taken steps to relax firearm restrictions that they describe as an infringement on Second Amendment rights.
That’s the reason to accept my proposal. Ownership of assault firearms would be prohibited until age 23. The government cannot strip people of owning guns unless they have a criminal record or certain mental illnesses.
If the United States had a better track record of writing and enforcing laws in good faith, I would agree. If the US had a history of having concern for mental health, I would agree. But for years the ability to strip felons of the right to vote and their gun rights has been behind the ever increasing amount of felony level offenses as well as the dubious practice of law enforcement being aware of crime but waiting to intervene until they have a laundry list of charges rather than busting someone in the act of a lesser crime they know is being committed. Defendants are overcharged, often times with accusations that wouldn’t stick if they took it to trial, but public defenders are overburdened, work for the state, and are pressured to get clients to take a plea deal under the promise of dropped charges, lighter sentence recommendations, alternative sentencing. It’s one of the greatest abuses of our legal system.
The easiest solution for our government to get around the pesky Constitution and its inalienable rights was to create a subclass, the felon, that society generally agrees doesn’t deserve those rights. But since they write the laws they can always make up new felonies and create more felons. I want to be clear, I’m not advocating for all felons to get their rights back, nor pretending like every felon is some innocent victim of a corrupt system, but the system is corrupt and abused at a lot of levels and I think that our current government is going to twist it even more to target their political enemies, either through incarceration or the threat of it. I think mental health flags under them would be even more dangerous because, what’s the baseline? Again, they make the laws and rules, they’ll make them to favor their beliefs, enforce them when it weakens us, continue to ignore the rantings and ravings on Facebook of their own so long as their targets are undesirables.
We’ve got bands of masked, unidentifiable men going door to door kidnapping, abusing, and murdering people. We have no idea if these people are actually ICE or enjoying the anonymity and indulging in violence, and the regime probably doesn’t care either way. I think it’s a dangerous time for the people and leaders of the opposition to be giving their enemies more new options to strip us of our rights and make it harder for their constituents to protect themselves against faceless mobs. I also think we need to have a national discussion about our criminal justice system and if everything we consider a felony is actually worthy of that definition and what restorative justice entails.
You have reasonable proposals, but our government has a history of using it’s power unreasonably.