VCDL REALLY Ready to Get It On? (Or Jes More Ghey 3% Cosplay?)

americanpartisan |  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 Citizens 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.