In this autumn of 2025, as America looks just a few calendar flips ahead to its 250th bash, there is a race in Virginia—the very state most responsible for the U.S. Bill of Rights—that should be a referendum on the Second Amendment. The fact that our right to keep and bear arms has not been so central to this race has nothing to do with the contrasting positions of its two candidates, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) and Abigail Spanberger (D).
Earle-Sears is a pro-freedom candidate who has been endorsed by the NRA Political Victory Fund. Spanberger is a vociferous gun grabber who has been endorsed by perhaps every gun-control group in the nation.
This massive difference in appreciation of our most-fundamental freedom should be an above-the-fold, much-discussed topic in this close election. Only it isn’t. The reasons for this are profound, telling and, well, they should furl your brow wherever you live, as this race could impact the 2026 battle for Congress.
First, the trouble for the anti-gun Left is this race for governor of Virginia goes against many of their anti-Second Amendment narratives—and exposes a lot of their favorite deceptions. This begins with the fact that Lt. Gov. Earle-Sears is a black woman and a first-generation immigrant (her parents brought her to the U.S. when she was six). Because of this, Spanberger’s campaign needs to somehow discount or outright ignore the immutable characteristics many in the Democratic Party have been so obsessed with of late. They also need to get voters not to even think of the lovely olive-drab U.S. Marine Corps’ uniform Earle-Sears wore from 1988 to 2000, a uniform decorated with her final rank of gunnery sergeant.
Now, Spanberger’s campaign might not mind so much if certain voters see the photo of Earle-Sears with a popular semi-automatic rifle she showed off in campaign ads back in 2021, but they don’t want this image to get too much attention, as it shows Earle-Sears to be the strong, pro-freedom advocate she is and, perhaps, it might even remind voters that Earle-Sears served this nation with, in training at least, an actual assault weapon in her hands.
To parry these honest and inconvenient (to Spanberger) images, Spanberger’s campaign has been working hard to avoid any real analysis of this constitutional disagreement. If her campaign pulls this off—and it is possible, as much of the media is on her side—she can win in this closely divided state.
That’s the first trick Spanberger’s political consultants need to pull off. The next is to get voters to see Spanberger as a strong advocate for the rule of law—all the crime and the cleanup from the Trump administration that has occurred in D.C. is very close to home for Virginians, particularly for those in the Democratic-majority counties near the nation’s capital. For this reason, Spanberger’s website takes great focused-group care to describe her as someone who has a record of “never backing down from her principles” and who will “keep our communities safe.”
Spanberger’s principles, of course, are precisely those of gun-control groups. Spanberger says she would have signed the dozens of anti-gun bills—including semi-automatic gun bans and magazine-size restrictions—that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) vetoed. Spanberger even called a ban on commonly owned semi-automatic firearms “common sense.” She also served as a volunteer for a local gun-control group.
As for keeping Virginians safe, Spanberger wants to disarm law-abiding Virginians while backing the types of laws that turned the District of Columbia into the murder capital of the United States. Her policies would disempower women—along with every other law-abiding citizen—who can’t afford armed security while blaming American freedom for the violence committed by criminals.
That’s a lot to hide from voters, but a mostly one-sided media makes it possible. Still, even with so much of the media helping to shape the narrative, avoiding all that Lt. Gov. Earle-Sears is and stands for is not easy, as every time Earle-Sears steps behind a podium or in front of a camera, she is a living reminder that the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners is women—and that black women in particular have been increasingly purchasing guns for self-defense.
Likely for this reason, Spanberger actually said no to a debate with Earle-Sears on CNN. The optics of standing on the stage across from Earle-Sears, and then perhaps having to tell Virginians that she wants to take away their guns as Earle-Sears shakes her head, would be bad for a candidate whose best chance of victory is keeping as many voters as possible ignorant of the truth about this issue.
“Your right to protect yourself must always be defended.” — Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears
However, even for a politician like Spanberger, it is difficult to completely obscure reality. And Earle-Sears has not been making it easy for Spanberger and her media sycophants. Earle-Sears, you see, didn’t only serve this nation as a U.S. Marine, but she also talks a lot about the lack of freedom she was born into in Jamaica—a situation her parents took her out of as they legally immigrated to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Earle-Sears often makes it clear that she is aware of, and greatly appreciates, the opportunities America and the commonwealth of Virginia provided to her.
“Your right to defend yourself must always be protected,” said Earle-Sears in a video interview with this magazine. “And, you know, I’m an immigrant to this wonderful country and I’ve seen what it looks like when, in other parts of the world, people don’t have this freedom.”
Earle-Sears also promises to keep defending American freedom in Virginia.
“Let me give you, for example, some of the really stupid—there’s no other way to say it—stupid gun bills [that were sent to Gov. Youngkin’s desk],” said Earle-Sears. “There was an assault-weapons ban, HB 1607 and SB 1181. There was another, HB 1608, that was a civil liability for the firearm industry … . This is crazy. It’s ridiculous. Let me tell you another one that was really dumb. [They wanted to make you] lock away your gun in one part of the room … and then, in another part of the house, they wanted you to lock away your ammo. So, if somebody is breaking into your home, you know what you’d have to do? [You’d have to ask the criminal] to hang on a minute [so you could] get your key.”
This is a point that Earle-Sears often makes. She even talked about this issue on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher; indeed, she managed to get Maher to say out loud that gun ownership empowers good people. Maher even nodded and said that “guns are a leveler” and joked that “I am as small as some women” as he agreed with Earle-Sears about the importance of the individual right to keep and bear arms.
In that interview, Earle-Sears also said, “Here’s the thing: If you’re breaking into my home as I am waiting for the police to come, I’m gonna shoot you. I’m gonna pray for you, but I’m gonna shoot you.”
Maher was laughing and nodding and had a hard time stepping back in with a comedic punchline when Earle-Sears said this. Her honesty had taken over the show. This is not the sort of thing Spanberger’s campaign and much of the media in and around Washington, D.C., want to happen in front of Virginia’s voters.
“Why do [blacks in Virginia] continue to vote the way that they do for one particular party and just leave the Republican party behind?” asked Earle-Sears rhetorically when we spoke, before adding that black voters are “really beginning to assess why” they have so often voted “wholly for the Democratic Party when [anti-gun politicians are] so against our own interests.”
Earle-Sears then said, “We are going to win in November because we have the common-sense ideas that will keep jobs coming to Virginia, that will keep more money in our taxpayer’s pockets, that they worked hard for and that will keep them safe and secure … . If they’re not safe and secure, we cannot have economic development. We can’t even talk about that. We can’t talk about education. That won’t matter. None of this will matter [without law and order]. And so, again, this is why we need our own protection in the form of our own guns.”
It is “important for us to be able to protect ourselves, to protect our families, to protect our businesses from the criminals among us ... . Self-defense matters. We must help law enforcement to protect themselves and protect us, so we will not vote to defund them as my opponent, Abigail Spanberger, has done. We will not vote against our Second Amendment rights as my opponent has done. And when I’m governor, you can be assured that if I’m willing to take the abuse now to protect you, then I will continue to make sure that you have your Second Amendment rights.”
So-called media “fact checkers” have criticized those who call Spanberger’s support for, when she was a member of Congress, the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020” an effort to defund the police. But this proposed legislation would have used federal funds to give grants to local and often far-Left activist organizations that would have drained the resources of police departments and forced police departments to spend more of their budgets on non-policing programs. It also would have weaponized the U.S. Justice Department against state and local police departments, which again would have impacted police budgets. In other words, the backers of this legislation gave themselves a semantic way out of having this bill called a “defund-the-police bill,” but, in effect, that’s what it would have done.
Given all that is going on with regard to law and order and our Second Amendment-protected rights in this off-year election, this is an important race. Indeed, Virginians’ Second Amendment-protected freedoms have hung in the balance in every recent election. As this is being written, in the Virginia Senate, Democrats hold a 21-19 majority; whereas in the Virginia House of Delegates, Democrats hold a 51-49 majority. Party affiliation should not by itself tell us where someone stands on this critical civil right, but in Virginia, as in the U.S. Congress, that is too often the case. With those slim majorities, anti-gun politicians passed a lot of gun-control legislation on party-line votes in the last few years. Gov. Youngkin stopped these infringements by vetoing dozens of anti-Second Amendment bills.
In Virginia, a governor can’t hold office for consecutive terms, so Youngkin could not run in this election cycle. Earle-Sears, who is the lieutenant governor, is trying to protect Virginians’ freedom for another four years.
And she has not been pulling her punches. She even pointed out that the “first demographic to have their guns confiscated and to be denied their Second Amendment rights were blacks,” before she argued that this sordid history has influenced her views of this constitutional right. “Harriet Tubman, she carried a pistol for protection,” said Earle-Sears.
Earle-Sears began her political career as the first black Republican woman in Virginia’s General Assembly. She later accepted presidential appointments and served at the U.S. Census Bureau and on an advisory committee to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. She is now running to be the next governor of Virginia, a state in which Tubman, a runaway slave, helped to sneak slaves out of.
The Left should be celebrating Earle-Sears. That they aren’t should tell voters all they need to know about these candidates.
