A northern Virginia gun owner who follows the issue closely – no, not the one you’re thinking of — shared some thoughts on how the NRA’s endorsement will play in his neck of the woods:

As to the Deeds camp thinking that an NRA endorsement will turn out Northern VA voters in droves for Deeds, let us debunk that now. The NRA is headquartered in Fairfax County. It has some 500+ employees at HQ, the vast majority of whom live in Northern VA. Those folks have families, neighbors and friends who don’t view the NRA as anything but the civil rights organization that it is. What’s more, there are quite a few gun ranges open to the public in Northern VA, all of which tend to be crowded on the weekends. I don’t think folks from Bath County are driving a few hours to shoot at a cramped range inside a gun shop in Chantilly. There are many, many gun owners in Fairfax, Loudon and Prince William counties and even Arlington and Alexandria.
Is Northern Virginia less pro-gun than most of the rest of the state? Sure. But it’s not New Jersey or Manhattan. Plenty of liberal Democrats here own firearms and believe in the Second Amendment. The big, scary NRA is not so scary to them. Any Deeds supporter who views the NRA endorsement of McDonnell as a good thing is either an idiot or a very new resident of the Old Dominion, probably living here only because rents are lower in Arlington than Northwest DC. This may be irrelevant or it may push McDonnell well over the top (assuming he needs a push), but there’s no way it hurts him.
One more thing: In the past four years, Attorney General Bob McDonnell told Mayor Bloomberg to take his “straw purchase” private investigators and shove them, or face arrest in Virginia. That meant a lot to NRA members in the Commonwealth.

UPDATE: This gun owner’s take is echoed by the quick take of Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the RNC who’s the general chairman of McDonnell’s campaign. “This hurts Deeds. The NRA’s membership is huge in Virginia.”