Fluvanna County, Virginia is a fairly red county in central Virginia, full of rolling hills and family farms. It went for Donald Trump over Joe Biden 51-47 in 2020, and Glenn Youngkin won 57% of the vote a year later in his run for governor. The county seat of Palmyra is just a short and scenic drive from my own home, so I was able to attend a jam-packed county commission meeting in late 2019 where hundreds of residents turned out in support of a Second Amendment Sanctuary resolution. Fluvanna County isn’t as ruby-red as some parts of the state, but there’s a pretty comfortable conservative majority. 

There’s also a small minority of anti-gunners trying to make life very uncomfortable for Second Amendment supporters; particularly the folks at Red Arrow Weapons/Red Arrow TV. The company recently made a donation to the local Parent Teacher Organization’s fall fundraiser. When some parents learned of the donation in late August, one of them sent an email to the school principal and district superintendent, saying they were “troubled by the idea of a company who markets weapons contributing to our school in any capacity.” 

In any capacity. 

The superintendent responded to the parent, pointing out that the PTO isn’t an official part of the school system, but added that Red Arrow’s donations were in line with district policy. A winery, for example, could donate a t-shirt or towel with its logo, but donating a couple of bottles of Fluvanna’s finest grape would cross the line. As it turns out, Red Arrow had offered a few t-shirts and stickers with their logo for an auction or giveaway. They weren’t offering a gun or even a bow to be raffled off to raise money for the PTO. 

That should have been the end of the story, but no. On the same afternoon that the Apalachee High School shooting took place, a local blog called The Good, Bad, and Ugly of the Fluvanna County School Board posted about Red Arrow’s donation to its Facebook page, directly linking the shooting and donation and declaring “a few community members and parents are not comfortable with the idea of assault rifles, bows, or other weapons being associated with our elementary school in any capacity.”

Again, in any capacity. 

A local blogger sympathetic to the parents objecting to Red Arrow’s donations has a more exhaustive (though biased) history of what’s happened in the week since, but the short version is that the donation is still in place, one of the school board members may not have been telling the truth about his employment with Red Arrow or its television production subsidiary (though why he’d need to do so is a mystery), and the culture warriors trying to cancel Red Arrow’s donations are heading to tonight’s school board meeting to protest. Since the superintendent has already said the PTO isn’t an official part of the school system, I don’t know that the board could take any action, even if there was a majority in favor of doing so. But why let a little thing like the rules get in the way of a good witch hunt, right? 

If these parents object to Red Arrow being associated in “any capacity” with the local schools, what about other local youth programs? Fluvanna County has a great baseball complex for Little League that’s right by the old high school-turned-community center off of Route 15. Would they object to Red Arrow sponsoring a team, or even buying the naming rights and calling the complex Red Arrow Field? Should their logo be banned in school, even though it doesn’t violate the dress code? What other steps should be taken to spare the kids of Fluvanna County from the knowledge of Red Arrow’s existence (and support of the public schools)?

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it to tonight’s school board meeting (Miss E had chemo today and feels like she got run over by a bus, so I’m sticking by her side this evening), but we’ll be following up to see what, if any action, the board takes. 

We write a lot about the litigation, legislation, and regulations dealing with the right to keep and bear arms, but the gun control lobby is also intent on destroying the Second Amendment culturally too; making gun ownership an abnormal, unusual, and taboo activity, and not just in anti-gun bastions like Washington, D.C. and Chicago. If this can happen in rural Virginia, it can happen anywhere.