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Waynesboro Republicans set to make November elections about the Second Amendment

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The Waynesboro Republican Committee has nominated a candidate to run for Waynesboro City Council who in 2020 wanted to turn the city into a Second Amendment sanctuary.

Consider this as you process what happened two days ago up in Buffalo.

A teen persuaded by white supremacy theories promoted on the dark corners of the internet and in the mainstream by Fox News walked into a grocery store and killed 10 people used a military assault rifle.

He was also outfitted in body armor, a key detail, because an armed security guard at the store fired several shots at the teen to try to neutralize him.

The shots from the armed security guard – in America in 2022, we need armed security guards to protect us at the supermarket – should have been the story that you hear from the Second Amendment sanctuary types, the good guy with a gun who stops a mass shooting.

Except that body armor doesn’t discriminate between the good guy with a gun and the bad guy wearing it.

Military assault rifles have no place in the hands of anybody outside the military or law enforcement, and yet, Second Amendment sanctuary advocates fight any restrictions on the right to bear arms, citing the 1970s rewrite of our understanding of what the Framers intended when they wrote and adopted the Bill of Rights.

The Second Amendment sanctuary folks seem to think that the right of certain people to own an arsenal outweighs the rights of the rest of us to be able to shop for groceries on the average Saturday.

And it’s not just the Second Amendment sanctuary folks.

Again, the Waynesboro Republican Committee has given its nomination in the Ward D race to Jim Wood.

Wood, 56, is the store manager at Nuckols Gun Works in Staunton, is a certified firearms instructor and is pursuing a degree in history from Liberty University.

He checks all the boxes for a Republican nominee.

The incumbent in Ward D is Sam Hostetter, a family medicine doctor.

Hostetter, an independent, could face an uphill battle in November. Ward D has a historical pretty strong Republican lean, something that the local GOP committee, which didn’t put up any nominees in 2020, is hoping to take advantage of this fall.

The 2022 cycle is the first in Waynesboro in which voting for the four ward seats will be limited to voters in those wards, meaning residents in Wards C and D – the two wards on the ballot in November – should expect to see people knocking on their doors to engage them in conversations about local politics.

The Republicans will want to frame the Ward D race as being one involving the guy who wants Waynesboro to be a Second Amendment sanctuary against the guy who voted against the city being a Second Amendment sanctuary.

Another way to look at it might be framing it as a race between a guy who thinks it’s perfectly OK for people to have assault rifles to carry into grocery stores against a guy who is there to help fix people who get caught in the crossfire.

Story by Chris Graham

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