So, a legislator proposes a bill to allow teachers to strike without being fired and gun nuts go after him because they think this somehow leads to gun confiscation:
Quote:
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/17/virginia-lee-carter-school-strike-bill-guns)
Virginia's only socialist state legislator said he has been the target of multiple death threats over a bill that pro-gun activists misinterpreted as a potential threat to their rights.
The legislation introduced by Lee Carter, a 32-year-old Bernie Sanders-endorsed socialist, would allow public school teachers to strike without being fired, and has in fact nothing to do with guns. But some gun rights activists wrongly interpreted it as an attempt to fire law enforcement officials who might refuse to comply with gun control laws introduced by Virginia's new Democratic legislative majority.
The result, Carter said, has been a torrent of threats and abuse on social media, from promises to vote him out of office, to claims that “this is tyranny and you know what we do to tyrants,” to explicit threats of murder, like, “I'm going to make sure you don't live through this legislative session” or “I'm going to kill this guy, y'all make sure you don't forget my name.”
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Carter, who was re-elected to Virginia's general assembly this November, said that the legislation that had led to death threats against him had originally been introduced last year. It was designed to repeal current Virginia law, which bars all public employees from striking, a policy that has been on the books since at least the 1950s, he said.
Public school teachers in other states have used strikes “to successfully raise the alarm about the conditions that they are teaching kids in”, Carter said. As a supporter of workers' rights, he said, he wanted to make it possible for Virginia's teachers to strike without being fired.
His original bill did not even get a hearing last year, he said, in part because his fellow lawmakers were concerned about the possibility of strikes by police officers undermining public safety. So he re-wrote the bill language, allowing all public employees except law enforcement officials to strike without penalty, and re-introduced it for the 2020 legislative session.
But when some gun rights activists read the bill, they claimed it meant something entirely different. Carter's bill to allow teacher strikes was written into a broader narrative “that spread like wildfire within the conspiracy-minded parts of the rightwing internet”, he said, claiming that the state's Democratic governor was working to confiscate Virginians' guns, and that his new legislation was designed “to fire cops who don't confiscate guns”.
That conspiracy theory relied upon a basic misreading of the bill text, which in fact kept longtime Virginia law intact for law enforcement officers, and created a new exemption for other public employees.
While a gun rights YouTube channel had appeared to be central to spreading the misreading of his bill to a wide audience, Carter said that some of the misinformation about his bill appeared to be fueled by police unions, and even by a fellow Republican state lawmaker - all people, he said, who should be able to accurately read legislation.
A longtime gun owner and marine veteran himself, Carter said he has never introduced any legislation related to guns, and that he considers himself a moderate when it comes to gun laws - supportive of universal background checks, for instance, but skeptical of an assault weapons ban.
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