Slow Facts by Rob Morse 2/25/2020
The news is amazing and occasionally unpredictable. News can be predictable and still be called news, the same way the weather changes in consistent but unscheduled ways. I want to contrast several political changes I saw last week. Some occurred because of easily identifiable actors, and some were unpredictable. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, there are knows, unknowns, and unknown-unknowns.
Knowns-
We knew that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been buying politicians for years. We knew that Virginia Democrats were for sale, but we didn’t know when Bloomberg would have his majority and how far those Democrat legislators would go with Bloomberg’s plans.
Mayor Bloomberg consolidated his takeover of Virginia in last November’s election. He got most of the political change he wanted when the Virginia legislature went into session in January. I said most, but not all, because the Mayor was frustrated by some of the votes. His most egregious gun control measures were voted down in committee. That is where a few Democrat legislators rejected some of the confiscatory gun control that Mayor Bloomberg wanted.
A few Democrat legislators opposed their party and stood up for the citizens in their district. That too happened for a reason.
Politicians have always been for sale, but the wholesale purchase of politicians by billionaires like Soros and Bloomberg is news.
Unknowns-
That brings us to the second unexpected change we saw last week. To understand it, we have to go back to the second-amendment-sanctuary movement started years ago in Illinois. For those that don’t know, Illinois politics are controlled by Chicago. In order to have some small measure of control, some Illinois counties passed local resolutions and ordinances that opposed the Chicago political machine. In particular, Chicago Democrats wanted firearms confiscation while Republicans and rural down-state-Democrats wanted the right to keep and bear arms. Too often, the Chicago Democrats would pass a gun-control law that would take decades to overturn in the courts. To protect their citizens, down-state-politicians in Illinois passed resolutions saying that sheriffs and other local officers would not enforce unconstitutional laws that infringe on the right to keep and bear arms.
What started in Illinois didn’t stay in Illinois. The second-amendment-sanctuary movement spread over the next few years from Illinois to Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and to Texas. Bloomberg’s takeover of Virginia accelerated the second amendment sanctuary movement. In the three months since last November’s election, 91 of Virginia’s 95 counties passed 2A sanctuary resolutions. Some cities in Virginia did so as well. A few counties established militia that the sheriff could activate in case of emergency.
More:
https://slowfacts.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/rapid-social-change-from-the-top-down-and-the-bottom-up/
Virginia 2A sanctuaries Jan 2020

Second Amendment Sanctuaries across the US, Feb 2020