Below The Radar: A Virginia Plan That Deserves Rejection

United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- Loyal Ammoland readers who remember history may have heard of the Virginia Plan presented before the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The convention threw a number of its key provisions out, but they salvaged a few items for the Constitution that has worked since 1789.

So, Second Amendment supporters should feel particularly insulted that Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia is now hijacking something that was part of building the Constitution that protects our rights to attack them instead, with a large side of the injustice of punishing people for crimes they did not commit.

Kaine’s “Virginia Plan to Reduce Gun Violence Act of 2021,” also known as S 1155, combined “universal” background checks with gun rationing in the form of a “one gun a month” provision targeting handguns.

It’s a two-for-one whammy that no law-abiding citizen wishing to exercise their Second Amendment rights should put up with.

“Universal” background checks have been addressed a lot. They’re a back door towards the creation of a gun registration system, and registration leads to confiscation. Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted a licensing and registration scheme and didn’t get it. This is why the Gun Control Act of 1968 was actually a strategic loss for anti-Second Amendment extremism. We can discuss that more later.

But the real issue here is the gun rationing scheme. This is being sold as an effort to stop firearm trafficking. What anti-Second Amendment extremists want people to forget are the provisions already in place with 18 USC 922 and 18 USC 924. This 1999 article by Wayne LaPierre runs the numbers on what the laws already in place could do for a criminal who runs just five handguns from, say, Indiana or Mississippi to Chicago.

When anti-Second Amendment extremists talk gun trafficking, their proposals seem to always involve new laws, when they’ve almost never enforced current laws. In the ongoing and unnecessarily nasty feud between pro-Second Amendment incrementalists and the “no compromise” activists, demands about enforcing existing laws are a bone of contention, but the provisions that could address those who provide firearms to violent criminals are a far cry from a ban on modern multi-purpose semiautomatic firearms.

It goes without saying that a rationed right is not really a right at all. What Senator Kaine is doing is asserting that keeping and bearing arms is a privilege. After all, who’s to say that when the gun-rationing scheme this bill would impose fails (because criminals break laws, of course), he won’t try one gun a year, or even demand that we prove our need for a given gun?

Second Amendment supporters need to contact their Senators and Representative to urge the defeat of this legislation. In addition, they need to support the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action and Political Victory Fund to ensure that the current anti-Second Amendment regimes in the House, Senate, and White House are defeated at the ballot box as soon as possible.

About Harold Hutchison

Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.

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