By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
In office only four months, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has found herself in the middle of a gun rights battleground, and the fault lies squarely in her lap and with her Democrat colleagues in the legislature for passing a slew of gun control bills, including one which brought a promise of federal legal action: Senate Bill 749.
Spanberger faces a deadline of 11:59 p.m. tonight—one minute before Midnight—to either sign or veto the bill. A third option, as noted by WVEC News, would let the bills become law without her signature.
In a sharply-worded letter to Spanberger, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which includes the newly-created Second Amendment section, Spanberger was warned the DOJ “will commence litigation in the event the Commonwealth of Virginia enacts certain bills that unconstitutionally limit law-abiding Americans’ individual right to bear arms.” The letter specifically mentioned SB 749, which would “unconstitutionally” restrict the manufacture, purchase or sale of AR-15 rifles “and other semi-automatic firearms in common use.”
This was no idle threat. Dhillon’s Civil Rights Division has already taken legal action against the Virgin Island police and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over delays in approving gun permit applications.
Dhillon’s letter, which also went to Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones and Matt McGuire, counsel to the governor, has brought cheers from embattled gun owners in other states.
The Washington Examiner quoted attorney William Kirk, president of Washington Gun Rights, who declared, “This is a big deal. For the first time in the history of the United States Department of Justice, you now have them stepping in preemptively before a bill actually becomes law and warning to a governor that ‘Hey, you may be going a bridge too far here,’ and then also being willing to back it up with litigation.”
In a video report on YouTube, Kirk observed that the battle over semi-auto bans “is clearly heating up.”
WRIC News in Richmond quoted AG Jones countering Dhillon’s letter: “This threat is a distortion of the very purpose of the Office of Civil Rights, abandoning the protection of the disenfranchised in favor of keeping weapons of mass murder on the streets. The Attorney General will take all necessary legal action to defend the Commonwealth’s laws and constitutional authority.”
SB 749, and the very similar House Bill 217, allow for “grandfathering” firearms already in possession, which has sparked a rush on gun shops by Virginia citizens wanting to get in under the wire.
