""The Democratic platform last fall was very clear,” she said in a statement. “Limiting access to weapons of war used in mass murder was a key part of that platform.”
Northam, supported by the newly-elected Democratic majority, highlighted eight measures at the beginning of the year that he said would reduce gun violence and save lives. Most of the other bills he supported — including limiting handguns to one a month and instating mandatory universal background checks — have passed in some form in both chambers.
“While the governor is disappointed in today’s vote, he fully expects the Crime Commission to give this measure the detailed review that Senators called for,” said Alena Yarmosky, Northam’s spokeswoman. “We will be back next year.”" Pilot
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""It's like a jewelry store smash and grab," Republican Sen. Bill Stanley said of Democrats' strategy. "They're going to grab everything they possibly can while they can get it before the lights go on and the siren goes off."
It’s a breathtaking change after years of legislative inertia. Virginia has been a political outlier among southern states for a while, routinely electing Democrats to statewide office. But Republicans held a firm grip on the legislature until President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, which mobilized disaffected suburban voters and boosted Democrats in two successive legislative elections. They have full control of the General Assembly this year for the first time in two decades." Pilot
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Well, pilgrims, Ralph Northam is, IMO, a very ambitious man. His eyes are firmly focused on a national level future in a Democratic Party that has gone permanently to the far left with the backing of the PTA/League of Women Voters left. A record of maximum endorsement of gun control laws can only benefit him in that future.
IMO Northam has been a smiley faced opportunist who has skated through life as a hale fellow well met type. He reminds me of Pompeo (first in his class at USMA).
Northam's Record – He had an Army ROTC scholarship at VMI just after the Viet Nam War when there were few who desired one and they were easy to get.
The Army sent him to a second rate medical school after graduation. He received full pay and allowances as an Army officer while there.
The Army then sent him to a medical residency on the same basis.
He tries at times to imply that he had something to do with treating combat casualties from the ME Wars. In fact, he was a pediatrician at an Army hospital in Germany. Yes, combat casualties passed through the hospital.
In return for education that the US Army provides, it exacts an obligation for active duty service. The ratio is usually two years for every year of education provided.
On that basis it seems evident that Major Northam MC, resigned as soon as he legally could.
As I said, he is IMO a lifetime opportunist. And now, pilgrims, IMO he is pursuing his political ambition at the expense of the declared interests of millions of his fellow Virginians. pl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Northam
Some in West Virginia are encouraging counties in Virginia to secede and become part of their state.
I live in a once very conservative county in my state. With the influx of many liberals from some of the more blue counties (because our county’s policies are conservative and therefore less dependent on high taxes for everything), I often now hear people here bringing up an idea that has been raised on other occasions in the past: our county should secede to become part of Wyoming just to the north of us.
The back and fort between liberal and conservative will never go away.
Regarding Diana’s comment, People in Idaho are apparently doing a similar solicitation aimed at some counties in Oregon.
part of Wyoming just to the north of us
Californians already screwed their state royally, now they escape to Pacific Northwest and are screwing those states also royally. Urban centers such as Seattle or Portland are done, I don’t think they will recover. It is a crying shame where it is all going.
“It’s a breathtaking change after years of legislative inertia.”
Assuming nothing much changed in Virginia for years under Republican control, I think this was to be expected and would be what we could expect if the deadweight that prevents much of anything being done in the US Senate would be lifted at last, too.
I believe in moderation (mostly) and government of cooperation between the parties. I am also a Democrat and not a believer in small government. Obviously I am often unhappy with what I see going on.
What’s been happening for the past 20 years is more and more a setup that involves one side obstructing the other and more and more tit-for-tat maneuvering between the two parties. This is not what I want to see happen but those who engage in this behavior don’t have grounds to complain when it comes back to haunt them.
I assume Rep. Bill Stanley and his colleagues fully intend to give back to the Democrats what they think they got once they are in power again. That of course is the problem. Because of demographic change in Virginia and the fact that the Republican Party is basically a party of white people it will become more and more difficult for Republicans to reclaim power in Virginia in the future. I do not know what they or the Republican Party will do about that.
That is not real government but that is what we the people are probably going to get.
It is wrong and it is sad.
I’m sure that that large, well-regulated group of folk who dropped in on Richmond will be happy to come back next year too.
Col. Lang,
Suppose the “blueing” of Virginia enabling the Democrats to win control of the Virginia legislature has consequences. Maybe as the two coasts become more and more expensive in terms of property values, there could be more migration to less expensive red states changing the politics through demographics.
I wonder what the long term impact of these migrations are. Florida is another example of a traditionally red state becoming more purple now.
I have sometimes thought how neat it might be if West Virginia were to change its name to Appalachia . . . and then invite as many bordering counties to join the State of Appalachia as might wish to do so.
jerseycityjoan
You are representative in your thinking and culture of the people who through their migration to Virginia are destroying all that I have loved here.
blue peacock
I looks to me that Virginia is permanently lost to other than carpet baggers.
jerseycityjoan,
“the Republican Party is basically a party of white people”
So is the Democratic party basicly the colored immigrant gay abortion party?
As a 30-year deer hunter from MD, who usually hunted in VA with my VA hunting buddy, first at a large Christmas Tree farm near Culpepper, later in the GW National Forest beyond Orkney Springs, I’d welcome any reasonable gun laws that would keep guns out of the hands of idiot hunters. I’ve been shot at before dawn on a post by a late arriving hunter shooting at my shadow, as he claimed, and at sunset leaving the field by another hunter claiming the same thing. I don’t know the details of the VA legislation, but many hunters support reasonable gun laws.
The Republican Party may currently be majority “White,” but I see many Hispanic people in my part of the country who are Republican.
By all accounts in national news, Trump is appealing to Blacks and has done more FOR the Black community than Democrats have. Rather than trying to appease them with Obama phones and EBT cards for use in local stores, including I suppose for purchasing liquor and cigarettes.
President Johnson remarked, I think, on sighing the Civil Rights Act something to the effect that it meant the Democrats had the Blacks in their pocket from then on.
It wasn’t a statement about how proud he was for doing what was right for the Black population but that it was for him a ploy to take the Black votes forever from the Republicans.
It may be that Blacks are waking up to the fact that they had simply been kept on the plantation, so to speak, by the Democrats.
Did you not see Trump’s State of the Union (actually the last two) in which he featured the things he has been doing for the Black population?
Democrats have become the party of elitist snobs who think they are educated because they’ve taken their education in Marxism and ultra liberal Feminism from radicalized college professors and indoctrinated graduate students who get some relief on their tuition by teaching undergrad courses. It’s the party of upper middle class women who try to be as “smart” as the nasty women on the Couch. Hopefully they will learn something from the lawsuits against them by the Covington, Catholic school kid’s lawsuit against them.
Seward,
Perhaps a training requirement for a hunting license would be appropriate since non hunting gun owners aren’t shooting at you during hunting season.
The Dot.com episode in California caused a large number of Californians to re-settle in Colorado since the Boulder-Denver area also had some computer-based industries.
They would come in and think only in regard to prices in CA and buy up properties at very high prices thinking they were getting a deal.
At the time, we called it the “Californication” of Colorado.
Many Texans used to come up here for the chance to experience our beautiful mountains. They weren’t here to buy up property so much; but they sure messed up mountain driving because they were so frightened of the winding mountain roads that thet caused long lines of cars behind them unable to pas as they drove many miles per hour under the speed limit afraid of the winding mountain roads with what to them were terrifying drop-offs on one side of the road.
Colonel, et al,
What might the Bard say:
“Yond Cassius [Northam] has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”
We’ve got one of our own up here in NJ in the person of Governor Murphy. Powered by the grievance/expropriation/
gibsmedat sector, he is beavering away at enacting similar measures. North Jersey Cassius, but unlike the real Cassius, who despite his personal ambitions still fought for the preservation of the Roman Republic, Murphy and his ilk wish to relegate our Republic to the trash can. Another blank slater; control inputs – educational, legal, what have you – and administrative state paradise will eventuate.
Fred,
I do not see how you can object to me saying “the Republican Party is basically a party of white people.” That is simply a well known fact that doesn’t seem to be changing as the country itself becomes more diverse.
What you say about the Democratic Party is true too except that you left out the white voters who of course contribute most of the money.
Not me though.
Col. Lang:
As I said before I am a Democrat who does not support small government but that does not mean that I support that changes that are taking place in our country. I am sorry that you feel you are losing your familiar home. That’s exactly how I felt that way before I left the NYC-NJ area in 2015.
It’s my impression that Virginia is changing due to an influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal) and well-to-do whites, many of whom have ties to government spending.
I do not support gentrification. Like other Americans I never had the chance to vote on the wholesale demographic change that has taken place in our country. If I could have voted, I would have voted to remain the country we once were, a white-black country with a scattering of Hispanics and Asians. If I could vote today to return us to what we were in 1970 I would do that. Not because I do not like anyone but simply because I think what we were was good enough and because our smaller population was better, too.
I am not such a good Democrat, according to some, but I don’t care. The Party can change around me. Last time I voted for Sanders and Trump and this time I’ll vote for a Democrat in the primaries and probably Trump in the general election again too, God help me. I criticize Trump every day but I can’t vote for the Democratic president, virtual open borders and lots more immigrants we don’t need. I just can’t.
jersecityjoan
You don’t get it. Virginia is not being gentrified , quite the opposite. The people that has lost its control over the government of their native state are a remnant of the yeoman farmers and their descendants. “Change” is not a value.
Col. Lang,
We will be extinguished as a people.
– Eliot
jerseycityjoan
The average white democrats are not funding the party and outside of academia and a few coastal cities they’ve been being ignored and insulted by the party for years; and as you point out they, like you, were not invited to vote on the strategic political policy of open immigration that is changing the racial makeup of the Republic. Black and Native Americans are beginning to realize how they too are being left behind by the ever growing claims of immigrants being superior to the native born Americans.
Eliot
Yes, and people like jerseycityjoan do not know what you mean by “a people.”
Col. Lang and Eliot:
Yes I can see we that we are being extinguished as a people and I hate it too.
If you have any suggestions about what more we can about this I am all ears.
Fred:
You are right about the Blacks and Native Americans. I feel great indignation on their behalf. Even now Black leaders are throwing their lot with the newcomers and are begging for more not realizing — somehow, I do not not understand how, the evidence to the contrary is all around them — that their natural allies for possession and control of America are the native born white people. So now the Blacks get to compete with people who just got here, they will never catch up as far as I can tell.
It is also the case that the native born white people do not see Blacks as their natural allies either. I see that a lot when I comment about immigration around the internet.
While I agree that the rich of the cities and the highly educated are big Democratic donors I think the Democrats still get lots of small contributions from the rank and file. Many of these people consider themselves “woke” but they are asleep in many ways and their moral and political beliefs merge in such a way that they deliberately keep themselves asleep. Of course there are some like me out there who realize we are on a road to ruin but no one is listening to us.
jerseycityjoan
I welcome your comment but Eliot and I are speaking of Virginians as “a people” in the same way that Washington, Jefferson or Madison thought that there was a distinct Virginia “people.”
jerseycityjoan,
You apparently don’t feel outraged enough to stop voting for people making that policy happen.
“So now the Blacks get to compete with people who just got here”
No, they and everyone else gets to compete with tens of millions of people who are 1st, 2nd, 3rd and future generation citizens – plus tens of millions of illegal residents – and whose loyalty to the idea of America is fundamentally different from that of most of those who have been citizens far longer than 3 generations.
“It is also the case that the native born white people do not see Blacks as their natural allies either.”
I don’t think you’ve lived in the South long or you would not being saying this.