VA Governor Terry McAuliffe’s ‘Red Herring’

 

GRNC

In response to Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring’s statement that Virginia will no longer honor North Carolina concealed handgun permits, Grass Roots North Carolina president Paul Valone made the following remarks:

“Ironically, earlier this year a liberal TV station in Raleigh raised the question of whether Virginia permit requirements are sufficiently stringent to allow Virginia permits to be used here. Now, liberal Democrats in Virginia are claiming our permit standards aren’t sufficiently stringent. What both have in common is that they are solutions in search of a problem, and are just thinly veiled political schemes to restrict the ability of lawful citizens to protect themselves and their families.

“In truth, regardless of issuing standards, concealed handgun permit-holders are overwhelmingly responsible, meaning they rarely commit crimes. I defy anybody to come up with credible statistics indicating that different issuing requirements correlate with the likelihood of permit-holders committing crimes, because those statistics don’t exist.

“In fact, we now have seven states with laws eliminating the need for concealed carry permits by lawful citizens altogether – that’s right, in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Maine, Vermont and Wyoming you don’t need a permit to carry a firearm for lawful self-protection. Yet even in the states where no permit is required, nobody has demonstrated a problem with lawful citizens suddenly running amok.

“By disqualifying fully twenty-five of thirty states from reciprocity, all Democrat Governor Terry McAuliffe and Democrat Attorney General Mark Herring (maybe we should call him “Red Herring?”) have done is to trump up an “audit” to restrict, as much as possible, the ability of citizens to protect themselves.

“Given that radical Islamic terrorists have vowed to hit “soft targets” in the United States, what Virginia and other states should be doing is to loosen restrictions on concealed carry, not tighten them. In fact, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto is credited with saying, “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” We are asking the 11 million concealed handgun permit-holders across the country to do exactly that, and to help them, we have set up a website at www.EveryBladeOfGrass.org.”