January 4, 2020

Virginia Is Ground Zero in the War over Gun Control

When Democrats won control of both houses of the Virginia Legislature November 5, 2019, Virginia gun-owners got a rude wake-up call. Now that wake-up call is spreading to gun-owners throughout the rest of the 49 states.
In July 2019, Gov. Ralph Northam proposed a package of eight proposals that would tighten Virginia's gun laws, known as some of the least restrictive in the country. Currently, Virginia's gun control measures of merit ban the sale of firearms only to high-risk individuals and those convicted of domestic violence. However, the proposals would turn the least restrictive into what some would call dangerously restrictive, a premeditated strike against the Second Amendment. Northam's proposed package calls for legislation:

Part one...13 min...

Battle of Athens

Requiring background checks on all firearms sales and transactions. The bill mandates that any person selling, renting, trading, or transferring a firearm must first obtain the results of a background check before completing the transaction.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/virginia_is_ground_zero_in_the_war_over_gun_control.html

The Battle of Athens

The GIs came home to find that a political machine had taken over their Tennessee county. What they did about it astounded the nation.

Lones Seiber
In McMinn County, Tennessee, in the early 1940s, the question was not if you farmed, but where you farmed. Athens, the county seat, lay between Knoxville and Chattanooga along U.S. Highway 11, which wound its way through eastern Tennessee. This was the meeting place for farmers from all the surrounding communities. Traveling along narrow roads planted with signs urging them to “See Rock City” and “Get Right with God,” they would gather on Saturdays beneath the courthouse elms to discuss politics and crops. There were barely seven thousand people in Athens, and many of its streets were still unpaved. The two “big” cities some fifty miles away had not yet begun their inevitable expansion, and the farmers’ lives were simple and essentially unaffected by what they would have called the “modern world.” Many of them were without electricity. The land, their families, religion, politics, and the war dominated their talk and thoughts. They learned about God from the family Bible and in tiny chapels along yellow-dust roads. Their newspaper, the Daily Post-Athenian , told them something of politics and war, but since it chose to avoid intrigue or scandal, a story that smacked of both could be found only in the conversations of the folks who milled about the courthouse lawn on Saturdays.

Since the Civil War, political offices in McMinn County had gone to the Republicans, but in the 1930s Tennessee began to fall under the control of Democratic bosses. To the west, in Shelby County, E.H. Crump, the Memphis mayor who had been ousted during his term for failing to enforce Prohibition, fathered what would become the state’s most powerful political machine. Crump eventually controlled most of Tennessee along with the governor’s office and a United States senator. In eastern Tennessee local and regional machines developed, which, lacking the sophistication and power of a Crump, relied on intimidation and violence to control their constituents.