Thread by @SeanPerryman3

I see a lot of tweets in Virginia politics talking about the resolutions declaring sanctuary cities for guns.

These tweets often compare so called 2nd Amendment Sanctuary cities to sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants.

This is absurd as are those 2A resolutions. 1/10

For those outside the Virginia politics perpetual circus, after Democrats won a majority at the state level, gun lovers started writing resolutions to declare their county or town a sanctuary from gun laws.

No, seriously this is happening. 2/10

There’s a lot of layers of absurdity with these resolutions but I’ll try to touch on as many possible.

For one, these resolutions seek to protect gun owners from non existing laws. They’re essentially trying to circumvent some future “door to door gun gathering.” 3/10

Forget whether you can enforce a resolution that feeds your own paranoia instead of addressing a law, the resolution themselves are nonsense.

A county or city cannot simply see a state law and say “we are going to pass on that one.” 4/10

Now this is where people like to compare it to sanctuary cities for undocumented people.

NOT. THE. SAME.

It’s long established that a state and localities can’t be forced to used their resources to enforce *FEDERAL* law. 5/10

This is how states can legalize cannabis/marijuana while it is still illegal federally. Their cops simply don’t enforce the federal law. Federal authorities obviously can and do still enforce it. Hence, why so many cannabis businesses are forced to use cash. 6/10

This doesn’t work at the state level bc the same rules don’t apply. There’s not the same federalism based separation of power. Not to mention these local authorities are operating using state money.

7/10

The federal govt for instance could get states to enforce their law by making their cooperation a requirement to receiving federal funds. States don’t need to do this. 8/10

Anyway, one of the things that really rub me the wrong way with the comparison to the situation immigrants were facing is they had an actual problem they were facing. It wasn’t imagined. Families were being deported. 9/10

Today @MarkHerringVA declared those 2A resolutions meaningless. And guess what? Nothing changes for those gun owners. They have the same rights and same guns they had yesterday.

That wasn’t the case for undocumented people.

Anyway, had to get that out there. 10/10