Va. gun group carries its goals out in the open

Throughout the state, the group has scored victories.
WASHINGTON POST
RICHMOND, Va. -- Philip Van Cleave, a slight, balding, 52-year-old computer programmer, chose beige corduroys to wear this morning, a blue tie and a white shirt with thin blue strips. And a gun to match the outfit.
Van Cleave, the president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, always carries a gun because you never know when you'll need it. But which one to carry and how can be complicated, he said, much like the dilemma a woman faces in accessorizing her outfit with the right shoes. Today, he picked a compact black .40-caliber Kahr pistol, slipped it into a special holster and dropped it in his front pocket.
Another choice
Arriving for lunch at a Topeka's Steakhouse 'n' Saloon not far from his suburban home, Van Cleave confronted another choice, an annoying one. Because the restaurant serves alcohol, Virginia law says he can't carry a concealed weapon inside. He would have to wear it in plain view. So he chose a different holster, one that fits inside his belt, leaving the gun exposed. Then he sighed.
"It's a pain to reconceal it. Sometimes you may have to literally do a striptease," he said. "Isn't it asinine that I even have to worry about that?"
He walked into the restaurant. No one blinked. "Smoking or non?" the waiter asked.
Van Cleave believes that every citizen should have the right to carry guns virtually anywhere, at any time, with no background checks, mandatory training or any other interference from government. "If I do something wrong with a gun, put me in jail," he said. "If I don't, leave me alone."
Toward goal
The Virginia Citizens Defense League and its 2,400 members have gone a long way toward achieving that goal in Virginia. In the past few years alone, the group has successfully sought out and helped strike down gun control ordinances throughout the state.
They fought to overturn a decades-old ban on guns in state parks. Then they went after gun prohibitions in city parks. Some cities, such as Radford, acquiesced within days, quickly painting over "No Firearms" signs. Others, including Norfolk, put up a fight before giving in. They've taken on libraries and Lowe's hardware stores so that gun owners can carry inside. They've boycotted shopping malls that bar guns, and they've published "gun unfriendly business" lists.
They sued Fairfax County and "won big time," Van Cleave said gleefully, to prevent officials from banning guns at recreation centers and county buildings. Thanks, in part, to the league, gun owners will soon be able to carry their weapons all the way to the terminal doors at Reagan National and Dulles International airports. And the group won't stop fighting until gun owners can bring their guns inside, right up to the metal detectors.
Turning up
In the past few months, Van Cleave and other group members have been turning up in Northern Virginia with their guns, at restaurants and malls and a contentious Falls Church City Council meeting. The show of weapons was intended to test the resolve of city leaders who, in Van Cleave's view, proposed to "harass" gun owners by calling the police if they showed up with any gun, concealed or exposed, on city property. City leaders called it something else: intimidation.
This year, the league's top priority, as always, is to pass a law that would allow Virginia's 112,000 concealed weapon permit holders to carry their hidden guns into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, something they were allowed to do until 1995, when the concealed weapons law went into effect, barring it.
The league has been scolded privately by national gun rights advocates for openly carrying en masse. Some league members showed up with weapons in full view at a September gun rights conference in Crystal City as the C-SPAN cameras started to roll. Conference organizers asked them to conceal or leave.
Joe Waldron, executive director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, wrote in an e-mail that was later circulated on the Web that Van Cleave and league members threatened to turn the event into a "see the gun nuts wearing guns on their hips conference."
Warning to the group
State Sen. Kenneth Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, a former police officer and a gun-rights advocate, and other lawmakers have warned the group that their "in your face" open-carry tactics may serve only to galvanize the opposition. "They are turning a smoldering spark into a raging fire right now as the state becomes more urban and less rural," he said. "That's a battle that they may be likely to lose."