Why Virginia Redistricting Referendum Should Matter to Gun Owners

It’s funny how Virginia Democrats, who said they weren’t going to gerrymander the state, immediately got to work gerrymandering the state upon taking office. Kind of like how they didn’t talk about gun control at all, instead running on affordability, and started passing gun control while also raising taxes, but doing nothing about affordability except putting it even farther out of reach.

They claimed it was in response to President Trump asking Texas to redistrict, but they were probably just angry they didn’t think of it first–just the off-year redistricting, that is, because gerrymandering is a bipartisan sport.

But thanks to state law, people get to actually vote on the matter.

Over at our sister site, Townhall, NRA executive director John Commerford makes the argument that this is a golden chance for gun owners in the Old Dominion State.

With the April 21 referendum just weeks away, Virginia gun owners have no time left—vote early today—to stop a power grab that would hand more influence to politicians already hostile to the Second Amendment.

…

Farmers who hunt their own land to feed their families, small-town gunsmiths serving three generations of shooters, range operators teaching kids and women safe firearm handling—all get systematically packed, diluted, and rendered irrelevant. A relative handful of voters clustered in one suburban corner end up picking more of Virginia’s congressional delegation than hunters, veterans, law enforcement families, and small business owners spread across 42,775 square miles of the Commonwealth.

That’s why this fight matters to gun owners first and foremost, not as some abstract political exercise. But we must remain engaged; it is not the time to sit back and watch. In November, gun owners stayed home. And now, the new radical majority in the Virginia General Assembly has shown its hand, jamming through several egregious gun control bills that ended up on the governor’s desk, and many more that didn’t make it that far.

Rural voters turning out in massive numbers would do a load of good in defeating this, especially as at least some who voted for this particular gaggle based on their campaign promises are having a lot of buyer’s remorse.

After all, when you run on something, that should probably be the kind of thing you start focusing on day one, not all this other stuff that had nothing to do with the promises made to voters.

Of course, if voters didn’t see this coming, that’s on them. I think we all knew this was coming, though maybe not as fast and furious as it did.

Now, this is the chance to turn out and smack Spanberger and her anti-gun cabal down and down hard. Yeah, it’s too late to do a whole lot about the couple of dozen gun control laws already passed, but it will at least serve as a wake-up call that they don’t have a blank check from Virginia voters to turn the state into California East.

If they don’t turn out, though, well…the state will almost deserve what’s coming to them in the next year or so. They’ll deserve it good and hard.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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