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Little old ladies in tennis shoes can carry an equalizer against the guy 
coming at her with a knife.

        

*washingtonpost.com* <http://www.washingtonpost.com/>
*Gun Group Puts Policy Goals in Public View*
Openly Armed, Advocates Contest Laws Across Va.

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 14, 2004; Page A1

RICHMOND -- 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.

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 re-conceal 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."

The Virginia Citizens Defense League and its 2,400 members have gone a 
long way toward achieving that goal in Virginia. In the last 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.

In the last 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.

Van Cleave organizes group members to flood officials with e-mail, write 
letters to the editor and show up at rallies and protests. They spend 
hours at the General Assembly in Richmond listening to boring testimony 
while politely waiting their turn. Much of the time, their weapons are 
in plain view.

"All lobbyists can pack a room. They just pack a room with guns," said 
Dana Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of 
Police, a group that favors some gun restrictions.

*The Making of a Purist
*

Something of a night owl, Van Cleave likes to take walks around the lake 
in his subdivision around midnight. When he does, he "double carries" in 
case an assailant knocks one weapon out of his hand. It's not about 
fear, he said. "Who would do that if they were afraid? The word is 
preparedness."

While he was growing up in Illinois, the only gun in Van Cleave's house 
was his BB gun. When he was 15, just as the family was moving to Texas, 
his father died suddenly. The next year, his mother bought him his first 
gun, a .410-gauge shotgun, and his uncle would take him bird hunting and 
"plinking" cans. At 21, Van Cleave volunteered to become a reserve 
deputy sheriff in San Antonio and purchased his first .357 magnum Ruger 
service revolver.

From that experience, he learned that an assailant with a knife can 
cover 21 feet in 1.5 seconds, that a bullet can travel 1,500 feet per 
second. As a deputy, he said, he looked into the eyes of violent 
criminals and saw no soul, "like a reptile." In this law of the jungle, 
he said, his gun is the great equalizer.

"I know the odds are slim that I'll ever have to use this. But you've 
got one life," he said. "If it got into a life-or-death situation, the 
person without a gun would take themselves out of the gene pool. And I 
would carry on."

Van Cleave has never shot a gun outside the shooting range. He's never 
had to draw one. He's never been the victim of a crime "except when 
someone stole my radio." Since 1984, he's worked out of his home in a 
quiet, planned community with neighborhoods named Willow Glen and Duck 
Cove, writing software. He rarely goes out, he said, "except to the 
grocery store."

He compares carrying a gun to wearing a seat belt. "I have insurance on 
my house, even though I don't think it's going to burn down," he said. 
"Things can happen."

Van Cleave joined the league in 1995, a year after it was founded by a 
group of men incensed that Iran-contra figure Oliver L. North was turned 
down for a concealed weapons permit. At the time, under a 1942 law, 
judges could decide whether to issue a concealed weapon permit to 
private citizens, based on proven necessity and whether the person was 
"of good character."

When the league and other gun rights advocates got the law changed -- 
now anyone except a felon can apply for and get a concealed weapons 
permit -- Van Cleave began to carry a weapon at all times. "I felt naked 
without it," he said.

He also became a purist. The Second Amendment is critical, he came to 
believe. Legal experts argue over its meaning, but Van Cleave shares the 
view of gun groups that it establishes the right to defend yourself, to 
defend the country against outside attack and "to take back your country 
should it ever become a totalitarian state."

"We're not envisioning America being taken over anytime soon," he said. 
"But with al Qaeda, you never know. The citizens will probably need to 
secure their own homes and restore order until the government got back 
on its feet."

In his living room, Van Cleave proudly displays the 2004 Grassroots 
Organization of the Year award from the national Citizens Committee for 
the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. The league's command center, so to 
speak, is upstairs. In it, Van Cleave said, are the computers with which 
he scans the Internet to keep up on changes in gun laws, monitors chat 
rooms such as Packing.org and sends out weekly VA-ALERT e-mails to 3,500 
subscribers. Sometimes, he stays up until 2 a.m. scrolling through news 
stories about innocents gunned down who may have been able to save 
themselves, he said, had they been armed.

Despite his citation, Van Cleave said he has no patience for what he 
calls the hypocrisy of national gun groups, who have not always 
supported the league's tactics. "If you can't exercise a right because 
you might offend someone or you're afraid someone will take it away, 
well, then you've already lost 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."

State Sen. Kenneth W. 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."

David Snyder, a Falls Church City Council member, is a case in point. 
When Van Cleave and league members carried weapons to a recent meeting 
to protest a gun control proposal, Snyder became more determined to 
fight them.

"Everyone I talk to asks, 'What planet are you on?' They're astounded 
that people are free to carry guns into governmental legislative 
chambers. It's absurd," he said. "It's time that someone draws the line 
and said that's not going to happen. We're not backing down."

Although the league is visible and tenacious, its true power comes from 
the General Assembly, considered one of the most gun-friendly 
legislative bodies in the nation. Gov. Mark R. Warner, a Democrat who 
openly courted the National Rifle Association to win election, signed 15 
pro-gun bills into law in the last session alone.

In two separate and largely unnoticed actions in recent years, lawmakers 
in Richmond overturned the right of cities and counties to make their 
own gun control ordinances. In 1987, lawmakers prohibited localities 
from making any new gun control laws. This year, they wiped out any gun 
regulations that existed prior to 1987. Gone was Alexandria's handgun 
ban. Gone was the 60-year-old Fairfax County law requiring a three-day 
waiting period for gun purchases.

On July 1, the latest "state preemption" law went into effect. Now, guns 
may be carried anywhere but in courthouses, schools, churches during 
services or on clearly posted private property. Concealed guns are 
banned in bars.

Van Cleave said the open carrying helps educate citizens and the police, 
many of whom did not know how liberal Virginia's gun laws are. When 
police stripped two young men of their weapons in a Starbucks near 
Tysons Corner in June, Van Cleave wrote memos to set Fairfax police 
straight.

Del. Mark L. Cole (R-Fredericksburg), a league supporter, said the 
restaurant ban is "a stupid law. There's not one incident that I know of 
where someone concealed carried, where they get drunk and shoot up the 
place."

Outraged gun control advocates, however, refer to the proposal to end 
the ban as the "designated shooter" bill.

The National Rifle Association, with 100,000 members in Virginia, has 
not taken a position on the restaurant bill for the upcoming session. 
And it largely keeps its distance from the Virginia Citizens Defense League.

"I've never run into them. Never talked to them," said Randy Kozuch, the 
NRA's national director of state and local affairs. "I think they just 
want to stir it up."

*Always Within Reach
*

Back from lunch and practice at a nearby shooting range, Van Cleave 
unwinds on his mauve sofa in his mauve living room amid silk flowers and 
tiny crystal tchotchkes. In the kitchen, his wife tends to the tiny 
papillon show dogs she breeds. They have no children.

Ironically, the one place you don't see a gun is in his suburban home. 
They may be locked away in his gun safe with its rapid-action pressure 
lock for quick opening in the night should an intruder break in. He 
won't say. He will tell you that one is always within reach and that 
each one is equipped with tiny dots of green-glowing radioactive 
tritium, the better to locate in the dark.

"Security," he said, "is 24 hours a day."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company