Virginia Man Sentenced on Machine Gun Charges, Despite Federal Gun Laws

It might be one thing if anti-gunners defended their proposals by arguing that while the law won’t stop bad people from doing bad things, it gives them something else to slap them around with when they’re caught.

After all, we know there are plenty of crimes that people commit despite the laws–hence why they’re called “crimes”– but they don’t. They frame them as prevention, that the laws in question prevent bad people from getting guns and doing bad things with them.

Which, as we all know, is stupid because it just doesn’t work.

A case in point comes out of Virginia, where a South Boston man was just sentenced on charges involving narcotics and machine guns.

A man from South Boston was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison on charges stemming from brandishing a machine gun and possessing distribution quantities of cocaine, the United States Attorney’s Office Western District of Virginia announced on Monday, February 2, 2026.

Following a two-day trial in May, 2025, 27-year-old Richard Elijah Jacobs of South Boston was found guilty of the following charges:

• Possessing with the intent to distribute cocaine and marijuana
• Possessing a machine gun in furtherance of drug trafficking
• Possessing firearms as a convicted felon

“The Western District will seek firm and swift accountability against those who illegally possess machine guns and other firearms while trafficking narcotics in the Western District of Virginia,” Acting United States Attorney Robert N. Tracci said on Monday.

Now, let’s understand that the South Boston here is a town in Virginia, not the neighborhood of Boston called “Southie” by some, which means we could probably understand what Jacobs has to say through his accent. (Seriously, my company commander at Great Lakes was from Southie, and I spent the first two weeks not understanding a damn thing the man said.)

Still, machine guns and cocaine aren’t legal for the general public anywhere in the United States, yet when a couple of guys started flashing guns, and police found Jacobs next to the vehicle in question, they found both in the vehicle.

Whoops.

Tell me, if gun control stops criminals from getting guns, and the issue with other gun control laws failing to prevent that is how not every state has the same laws, how did Jacobs manage to get his hands on not just machine guns, but also illegal drugs?

Could it be that criminals get things through criminal means, thus the laws do nothing to prevent anything?

Nah, that can’t be, because the anti-gunners all swear that it’s about preventing guns from falling into the wrong hands, at least until they’re confronted with something like this, and they couldn’t possibly not know what the hell they’re talking about, now could they?

Now, to be clear, the machine guns in question were firearms equipped with full-auto switches, which are easier to get than purpose-built machine guns, but that doesn’t matter in the eyes of the law, and it doesn’t matter for our purposes here since they’re still illegal.

Unfortunately, history tells me that anti-gunners will learn nothing from this, continue to peddle the same untruths to anyone who will listen, and the media will run with those untruths as if they’re universally accepted facts.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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