Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins has been on the front lines of the fight over our Second Amendment rights in Virginia over the past few months. He generated a lot of headlines when he vowed to deputize county residents so that they would be exempt from any ban on civilian possession of semi-automatic firearms, ammunition magazines, or suppressors, but the sheriff has also been a familiar face at the legislative hearings on many gun bills as well.

In fact, Sheriff Jenkins was in the room when the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send Ralph Northam’s gun ban bill to the Virginia Crime Commission to be studied, effectively killing the legislation for the rest of the session. On today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co., Jenkins tells me he had no idea how lawmakers were going to vote when he showed up Monday morning, but he knew it was important to be there.

Jenkins says even with the defeat of HB961, there are plenty of bills that he’s concerned about in the legislature, including “red flag” legislation that’s passed both the House and Senate, although in different forms. Jenkins believes that neither version respects the constitutional rights of Virginians, including their right to due process. The sheriff also says the bill does nothing to address a personal who’s actually in a mental crisis, and notes that while things are slowly getting better, state lawmakers are still not moving quickly enough to address the crisis in the state’s mental health system. All too often, Jenkins says, those in need of mental health treatment end up cooling their heels in a jail cell instead.

In fact, Jenkins tells me that even if had no constitutional concerns about Northam’s gun bills (which is not the case), none of the proposals that he’s seen are supportable from a law enforcement perspective. Jenkins says instead of zeroing in on the state’s legal gun owners, the governor and Democrats in control of the state legislature should be looking at laws that would impact the state’s violent criminals instead.

Be sure to check out the entire interview with the sheriff above, and stick around for even more news, including an armed citizen story involving an off-duty husband and wife who stopped an armed robbery during their date night, a career criminal in Nashville who’s now behind bars after allegedly beating his wife while out on bond, and a team of good Samaritans who came to the aid of a family after their SUV plunged into a rain-swollen river in South Carolina.

Thanks as always for watching, listening, and spreading the word, and be sure to tune in tomorrow for complete analysis of the Democratic debate in Las Vegas from a Second Amendment perspective.