Virginia Flips Blue, Gun Owners Fear New Zealand-Style Confiscations

Sorry, “Old Dominion State.” You had a good run. From the late 1500s when my ancestors landed there, until just this week in 2019, Virginia was an important part of America’s history.

But now the state House and Senate in the Commonwealth have flipped blue. Democrats control the House and Senate, and Mr. Blackface McKlanhood Northam is still in the Governor’s mansion. Looks like those babies that survive botched abortions will be “made comfortable” after all.

Virginia’s storied past will now descend into a dystopian future which involves high taxes, crushing anti-business regulations, armies of hobos, sidewalk dung and New Zealand-style gun confiscation.

How is New Zealand’s gun confiscation program going, by the way? Let’s do a quick check.

It’s been several months since the Christchurch mosque shooting took place. Because New Zealand doesn’t have its own version of the Second Amendment to protect its gun owners’ rights, the Kiwi government banned semiautomatic rifles overnight and announced that it would be rounding up all the guns.

People who own banned guns in New Zealand have an amnesty period until the first of the New Year to turn them in. Once January 1 rolls around, everyone who still has a banned gun in their possession is officially a felon.

So far, out of an estimated 175,000 semiautos in New Zealand, a whopping total of 32,000 have been turned in. At that pace, lawmakers are optimistic that they will gather around 50,000 banned guns by the time the amnesty period expires. That would put the final compliance rate at around 29%. According to newspapers in New Zealand, this will “represent a modest but tangible success for policymakers.”

Ha! Did you catch that, kids? The next time you score 29% on your math test, just tell your parents it represents a “modest but tangible success.”

Some of us look at 29% and think that it represents a tangible failure, but what do we know? Truthfully, I think 29% is pretty high for New Zealand. I was expecting compliance to be much lower.

In New York, for example, the SAFE Act made it mandatory for all “assault” weapon owners to register their guns with the government. The compliance rate there has been around 4%, meaning that 96% of gun owners in New York are now felons because of firearms that they legally purchased.

And speaking of New York, that is the real reason why Virginia just “flipped blue” in my opinion. Earlier this week I told you about how that gun grabber Michael Bloomberg pumped millions of dollars into Virginia’s elections. He even sent out a letter to every gun owner in the state smearing the NRA, saying that the pro-2A organization is evil and hasn’t been doing a good enough job for them. While what Bloomberg did certainly could have contributed to slipping the state blue, it’s not the only reason.

Having lived in Virginia for a couple of years, I have a different opinion on why the state flipped: Mass immigration. My family spent 2009 and 2010 in central Virginia, and one of the most striking things about the state was how many damn New Yorkers had moved there. In two years, we only met about three families who were lifelong Virginians. Everybody else was from New York, which they had fled to get away from high taxes, regulations, sky-high rents and MS-13.

Even the Republicans from New York were wildly left leaning compared to normal Americans. They were all big fans of that McCain fellow from out in Arizona. You can’t really blame the New Yorkers for moving to Virginia. You could buy a hobby farm with a couple of acres in Virginia for the price of a small shed in New York. But the thing about mass immigration is that the invaders don’t change their voting patterns just because they move to a new spot.

I remember telling my wife back in 2009, “If this many New Yorkers keep moving down here, it’s going to turn the state blue within 15 years.” I was wrong. They did it in ten.

Despite having the sense to go all Kurt Russell and “Escape from New York,” the New Yorkers just kept voting for the same types of politicians that made New York a gun-grabbing, taxes-and-rents-through-the-roof, regulatory nightmare in the first place. So, now Virginia will become ‘South New York.’

Ten years from now, the New Yorkers who fled to Virginia will start moving to Tennessee and saying without a hint of irony, “Gosh! I moved from New York to Virginia to get away from these high taxes! I’m outta here!”