22,000 Virginians in Richmond: Gun Control and the Bigger Issues

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This is a complicated piece of writing for me. I feel very torn about the issues happening in my old home state of Virginia right now with the proposed 2020 gun control legislation and protests in Richmond. I’m glad I left the Commonwealth when I did, but even from the relative safety of Europe it’s difficult for me to express the complex opinions I have about the situation. The subjects of gun control and Second Amendment rights are polarizing. Yet my view on these matters is anything but polarized. I seem to take a third and rather lonely position that may seem to some like fence straddling, which it isn’t. I’ll do my best to explain.

I grew up around guns. I never cared much for them personally, mostly because the typical use I saw for them was killing animals, which I’ve never been able to stomach. Yes, I’d eat the deer shot by those guns once it was prepared and no longer looked like a deer, but if left to fend for myself in the wilderness, I would have starved before I murdered a living creature for food. I understood how this made me a hypocrite then, and it still does today. At the same time, I never felt compelled to demand that any hunters give up their rifles, just like now, as an adult, I don’t personally have an overwhelming urge to see Americans stripped of their firearms. Like I said--complicated. And no doubt very hypocritical.

On Monday, January 20, 2020, protestors gathered in Virginia’s capitol city of Richmond to make a statement about their right to bear arms. More than 22,000 people showed up, most of them armed to the teeth, some of them my personal friends. Despite the passionate nature of this gathering, not a single shot was fired, no one was injured, and only one person was arrested, and that for persistently wearing a bandana to cover her face after being told by police that it was unlawful to do so during a protest.*

These are extremely significant statistics. They force a re-evaluation of America’s gun culture and the misperception that lawfully armed citizens are violent citizens. For me, this underscores the fact that proposed gun control legislation is less about public safety than it is about political agenda. I’ve heard several “globalist” conspiracy theories lately, and some of them may have merit given the nature of recent events. I think there are much larger human rights issues at stake here than just the Second Amendment.

Where I Stand

I’ve been in Europe for several months now, and the freedom to live without constant fear of gun violence has a stunning psychological impact. People still get killed here--in Eastbourne, England, where I spent the last three months, there has been a spate of assaults and some knifings, and one woman was pushed to her death off a balcony. Yet the streets of Eastbourne are still safe to walk, even late at night. Schoolkids seem so innocent there, lacking the shadow of fear that has started to creep across the faces of children in the U.S who live with constant stress of a potential school shooting. They can be subtle, the differences between a gun culture and a non-gun culture, but when you’ve been immersed in both for a while, you can definitely see the contrasts.

If I return to the States, however, I will own a gun. I would not feel safe there without one. And I would certainly not feel safe living in a country that proposed to strip me of any weapons I currently possessed--a “disarming,” so to speak, potentially at gunpoint if rumors are believed. The Second Amendment was enacted not for American citizens to protect themselves from burglars, but so they could protect the nation from tyranny. Therefore the question must be asked: who would stand to gain the most by repealing the population’s right to bear arms? Anyone not looking at it from this perspective needs to give themselves a good, hard pinch to make sure they haven’t fallen asleep at the wheel.

Even More Complicated

My concerns don’t end there. One potential outcome of this tableau is so chilling that it’s literally keeping me up at night, five thousand miles and an ocean away from all the conflict. It is the possibility of civil war, which I believe would be brief, brutal, and veritable genocide.

Ragamuffin foot soldiers won the Revolutionary War with muskets. Half-starved Confederates gave the Union a run for their money in the Civil War with rifles and a few cannons. These days, the U.S. Army has at its disposal weapons so powerful my brain can’t even conceive of the damage they could do to homeland rebels, even well-fed and well-trained ones. Every armed citizen, every militia, every police force in Virginia might stand together prepared to fight, but one order from the powers that be could roll the tanks, scramble the fighter jets, launch the missiles. And it would all be over, just like that.

Think it couldn’t happen? Think it wouldn’t happen--not in America? I don’t shared your confidence.

Here in France, I’m privy to a little more information about les gilets jaunes and the strikes and the overall political unrest than mainstream media has reported. I’m not saying that French protestors haven’t resorted to violence and civil disobedience. But I am saying that French police responded aggressively and without any respect of person for their French countrymen. Watch the video below to see what I mean. It’s an older video, been around for a while. But it clearly demonstrates my point--a malignant governing authority will not hesitate to use native police and military as henchmen to maintain control of the populace. And the henchmen they recruit don’t seem to have a conflict using excess force against their own people.

Now I ask this question: what if those protestors had been armed? What if the police thought they had the potential to be armed? Would the abuse of power have stopped with batons and beatdowns? Or would someone have opened fire? And if the protestors did indeed back the police officers down with bullets...what then? Would the French government have just said, “Oh well. Lost that round.” Or would they have sent in military forces to put down the “domestic terrorists” who believed they were only defending their basic human rights?

It isn’t such a stretch that familiar scenes might start playing out in the U.S. soon. But I expect a much bloodier outcome. American sons and daughters sent to squash an uprising of good ole’ boys with guns will do their jobs as instructed, because the U.S. military trains our soldiers to follow orders without question. Their weapons are much bigger, much more powerful, and ten times more effective than anything a registered gun owner--or a local police officer--can legally carry. There would be no contest. Things have changed since the Revolutionary War. And I certainly hope my friends back home in Virginia are thinking about this as they brandish their weapons in defiance of pending 2020 legislation.

Hell if I Know the Answer

Do I think gun owners in America should just roll over and surrender their weapons? No. And this is where it gets more complicated than the complicated mess it already is.

The cover photo of this article was taken by someone very dear to me on January 20, 2020, at the rally in Richmond. To me, it’s iconic. Those men showed up to protect the rights and the physical well-being of lawful protestors if things got out of hand. They look very impressive, even a little scary. But I am a thousand times more scared for them than I am scared of them. They would be among the first targets hit by any law enforcement or U.S. military troops on a witch hunt for domestic terrorists. I don’t even want to imagine what the outcome of that would be.

I don’t pretend to have a solution. I’m very proud of the Virginians who showed up in Richmond to peacefully assert their right to bear arms in America, including the men in that photo. I’m equally terrified for them. At this point, I wish nobody had guns. Correction: I wish nobody needed guns. Most of all, I just hope everyone in Virginia is considering the possibility that the Second Amendment itself has been outgunned, since a civil war can’t be won with firepower anymore. In the event of conflict, he who holds the rocket launcher wins.

It’s definitely a mess. It’s definitely complicated.

God bless America.

*CNN
Cover photo used with permission.

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