Posted by Matt Bracken
Rolling into 2020, all eyes are on Virginia following Governor Ralph Northam’s declared intention to pass onerous new gun control laws that could mandate the forced confiscation of common semi-automatic firearms which have been legal for Virginians to own for more than a century, ever since their invention. The first date in the coming showdown to be aware of is Monday, January 20th, when the Virginia Assembly opens for the new session, and Northam’s new gun laws will be considered. The Virginia Civil Defense League, a pro-Second Amendment group, is organizing a “Lobby Day” rally to be held at the state capitol to oppose these new gun control laws. It’s estimated that thousands of Virginians will attend the VCDL rally, many arriving in buses from all over the commonwealth.
In response to Northam’s plans, 90% of Virginia’s counties and many of its independent cities have declared themselves to be “second amendment sanctuaries.” After receiving vociferous pushback, Northam has recently stepped away from promising the outright confiscation of currently owned semi-auto weapons, and he is instead now demanding that gun owners register “grandfathered” weapons with the state government. Based on recent experiences in New York, Connecticut and other states that mandated registration, it’s assumed that very few Virginians will comply, instantly turning hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens into paper felons.
What will Northam’s response be to mass defiance of his gun control edicts? Common investigative tools could easily be used to locate non-compliant Virginians and arrest them on felony gun charges. At least some gun confiscation raids would inevitably lead to armed resistance, beginning a cycle of action and reaction that could, over time, grow into a low-intensity guerrilla conflict or a “dirty civil war.”
How plausible is this unwanted outcome? And what forms might a civil war over gun rights take? In certain respects we are in uncharted waters, because there are some new and unique variables in the known and studied civil war and counter-insurgency equations that are far out of line with available historical precedents. Chief among them: in all of history there has never been a civil war where, at the outset of hostilities, the resisting indigenous population was armed to the teeth with rifles capable of making 500 to 1,000 yard aimed precision shots. Never.
On average, approximately 64,000 people live in each of Virginia’s 133 counties and independent cities and towns, average land area 324 square miles. Measured another way, about 7,000 people live in each of Virginia’s 1,218 postal zip codes, average land area 42 square miles. About 250,000 Virginia state hunting license are issued each year, a small fraction of the total number of firearm owners. Now this is just a guess, but I’d bet that there are at least a hundred riflemen in every Virginia zip code capable of walking out their front door in the next five minutes, and making a rested 500 yard aimed precision shot. (For non-shooters, that means these marksmen can hit the man-size target they are aiming at.) And many of these marksmen are hunters and outdoorsmen who know their regional woods and forests like the backs of their hands.
But before any gun confiscation raids take place in Virginia, Northam’s new laws will be challenged in the courts, and, given the extremely dire potential unintended consequences, these legal challenges will quickly rise to the Supreme Court. The odds of the SCOTUS coming down on the side of confiscating millions of firearms that were legal and available for a century-plus until this year is practically nil. If the SCOTUS green-lighted Northam’s gun confiscation plans, nullifying the Second Amendment, they would virtually be declaring war on tens of millions of constitution-believing American citizens, igniting Civil War Two. Given this grim reality, and with the present SCOTUS, it’s almost inconceivable that Virginia laws permitting mass gun confiscation would be declared constitutional. Mandatory registration laws would be a more complicated issue. Creating hundreds of thousands of paper felons from those who refuse to register their firearms could simply lead to a multi-step means of confiscation via investigation, arrest, prosecution and imprisonment.
But even if the Virginia governor was given the go-ahead by the SCOTUS, and even if the present demographic shift in Virginia (based on mass immigration) continues to favor the Democrats in future elections, if any significant percentage of Virginians consider gun confiscation raids to be unconstitutional and worth resisting, make no mistake, there will be armed resistance. Many millions of Americans, including Virginians, consider mandatory gun registration (much less confiscation!) to be a necessary first step on the path to socialist tyranny, boxcars, gulags, and worse. If and when widespread gun confiscation begins, even under the cover of so-called “red flag” laws, or following the refusal of Virginians to comply with gun registration mandates, there will be a civil war.
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