The Roanoke Times’ Dan Casey is playing confiscation propagandist.

CASEY: Don’t believe the scaremongering on gun legislation
Probably by now, you’ve heard a hue and cry about the “great Virginia gun confiscation scheme” that’s about to be hatched in Richmond.

Yes, we have heard about it.

According to the more lurid propaganda now circulating, the Virginia National Guard will be going door-to-door, searching homes, seizing firearms, leaving law-abiding gun owners vulnerable to attacks by criminal hordes and organized gangs such as MS-13.

Casey hangs around some odd web sites if he’s seeing that. Despite my extensive reading on firearms policy and law, I haven’t run across claims that will happen. I have seen analyses of ramifications of filed Virginia legislation.

Relax. It’s not going to happen. Probably there’ll be some changes to gun laws, and some long-overdue tightening of statutes that were increasingly relaxed during two decades of Republican rule.

But nobody’s going to be going door-to-door seizing firearms. And any legislation that passes is likely to be quite familiar to Virginia’s 8.57 million residents.

Consider just two major proposals on the table.

So he ridicules the possibility of bans and confiscation, and supports his position by bringing up firearm purchase rationing and the elimination of state firearms law preemption, as if that’s all that’s being proposed.

Let me bring up another bill that was filed. I can’t think of how Casey missed it, given the very subject he mocks: VA Senate Bill 16: Assault firearms and certain firearm magazines; prohibiting sale, transport, etc.. Since the Democrats have the house, senate, and governorship it seems likely this will pass. I hardly expect the senate majority leader to let it die… since Sen. Dick Saslaw himself is the original sponsor.

That bill completely bans several large classes of common firearms. There is no grandfathering. No “buyback” provision to compensate owners for their loss. Casey somehow hasn’t noticed this. What did he think prompted Rep. Don McEachin to say, “Ultimately, I’m not the governor, but the governor may have to nationalize the National Guard to enforce the law”?

That was no “idle, ill-thought-out comment.” That was a carefully crafted proposal made in a planned interview with a national media outlet, in response to most of the state’s counties and towns announcing that they would not enforce that law if passed.

Sure, afterwards, the governor claimed the bill would be amended to grandfather in existing firearms so long as the owners register them like good little serfs. But 1) it hasn’t been amended, 2) no substitute bill with grandfathering has been filed, and 3) the governor is already budgeting for personnel to enforce SB 16, and for an increased corrections budget for people incarcerated under the proposed — and not even passed yet — gun people control laws.

When governor, senate majority leader, and a congresscritter tell us that they are going to try to take guns, tell us how many millions of dollars they plan to spend trying to take guns, tell us how many people they plan to hire to try to take guns, and tell us how much money they expect to spend to imprison those that don’t want their guns taken…

Virginians should take them at their word, Casey’s clumsy attempt at dismissal through obfuscation and misdirection not withstanding.

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