Virginia governor Ralph Northam has declared a state of emergency in advance of a planned open carry rally in Richmond on Monday, Martin Luther King Day.  You’ll recall that the Dems took the statehouse and governor’s mansion in November, and are planning to enact common sense gun safety laws after finally ousting NRA shills who had previously controlled Virginia for years.  The response to this news by gun nuts was predictable – threaten legislators with violence if they dared do that as well as whipping up a huge rally with thousands of gun toting weirdos bussed in from all over the country galvanized by wild conspiracy theories about gun confiscations. Northam is trying to prevent the nonsense that happened at Charlottesville in 2017 when the “Unite the Right” rally turned into a melee including several so-called “militias” (they’re not) parading around playing Army dress up and confusing an already chaotic scened that resulted in one death and dozens of injuries when a white supremacist, so incensed at anti-racist demonstrators that he plowed his car into a crowd of them.

In my interactions with gun nuts I’ve always found one consistency – the level of their obsession with their “God given gun rights” is directly coordinated with their lack of qualifications to get near a firearm including criminality.  AND, these people just don’t have the common sense to understand that threatening a legislator’s or their family’s lives with gun violence is not a good way to make their case that they should be allowed to parade around in public toting an assault weapon with a loaded 30 round magazine.  It’s like trying to negotiate with a cornered badger.  There’s just no upside in even trying.