Tag: gun

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Opinion

A-list: Virginia’s GOP legislators stay NRA strong

U.S. Senate hopeful Corey Stewart’s campaign stunts included giving away an AR-15 at a gun range in 2016. In February 2017, he held a rally in Charlottesville in support of keeping the Robert E. Lee statue in Emancipation Park. EZE AMOS

It’s disappointing that the Virginia legislature didn’t see fit to advance even a sliver of new restrictions on guns, militias and racist, reactionary mayhem during the current session. Not a single bill drafted in response to August 12 made it through for consideration in the other chamber, nor did some 60 gun control-related bills.

Plainly, GOP loyalty to the gun lobby trumps outrage over the terrifying presence of self-described militias on Charlottesville’s streets last summer. Certainly, the NRA appreciates it that way, expressing late last month its thanks to the House and Senate committees and NRA members “who voiced opposition to these dangerous attempts to restrict our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.”

Disappointing, for sure, but unsurprising considering the near-victor in the Republican gubernatorial primary last year included an AR-15 giveaway in his arsenal of campaign stunts. Yes, Virginia, with the slaughter at Virginia Tech only a decade in the past, Corey Stewart was giving away a semi-automatic weapon to a lucky supporter at the end of 2016.

Leaving aside whether Stewart lacks empathy for the families of those victims and the survivors of the Tech trauma, the chair of the Prince William Board of Supervisors and 2018 U.S. Senate hopeful is certainly tuned in to the values of some Virginia voters. Recall that Stewart lost the Republican nomination to Ed Gillespie by a slim 4,537 votes.

Still, even a gun guy like Stewart, similar to his former boss Donald Trump, can’t ignore the mounting public pressure to do something real about the scourge of gun violence across the United States. “I think teachers and students are sitting ducks right now,” he told a Norfolk TV station after Parkland. His proposal? It’s straight out of the NRA playbook: arm teachers. Not any teachers—just the ones with good dispositions. Feel better now?

(By way of contrast, note that Tim Kaine, the Democratic incumbent senator who was Virginia’s governor at the time of the Blacksburg massacre that left 32 dead and 17 injured, is openly emotional about what he calls “the worst day of his life.” The NRA grades him an F.)

Stewart, who earns an A rating, is not the only NRA darling running for office this year. The 5th District’s own Tom Garrett has has taken a couple of Gs from gun lobbyists. He too is an A student of the Second Amendment.

The thing about Virginia’s lax gun laws is this: They don’t affect Virginians alone. Inconsistent regulations on background checks and ownership across the country leave everyone vulnerable to gun violence. As my colleague Scott Weaver described in this paper 10 years ago, Virginia is a leading source for guns in New York City, for example, where firearms restrictions are much tougher. In turn, New York City is a leading source for drugs in Virginia. Well known in law enforcement circles for decades, this channel of illicit transaction has earned I-95 the moniker Iron Pipeline.

Maybe it’s a reach to hope that Corey Stewart and Tom Garrett will give a flying pickle about the perils of Virginia’s gun laws for people in other parts of the country since they seem unmoved by the dangers closer to home. But as the students in Parkland are demonstrating, there’s a reckoning a-coming for any lawmaker who denies the interconnectedness of the gun violence. The question in Virginia and across the country is: How long will it be before voters teach politicians a lesson about school shootings?

Yes, Virginia is a monthly opinion column.

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News

DOA: Gun safety bills die in subcommittee

Delegate Matt Fariss, R-Rustburg, represents southern Albemarle and sits on the Militia, Police and Public Safety subcommittee that regularly kills gun safety measures. File photo

Andy Goddard has been going to the General Assembly since 2008, the year after his son was shot four times in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. In his 11th year monitoring the legislature and how it deals with mass murders and guns, not much has changed.

“It’s the same old thing,” says Goddard, who’s the legislative director for the Virginia Center for Public Safety. “The one subcommittee in the House that kills all the gun bills used to be 4-1 Republican majority.” Now, with last fall’s Democratic insurgency in the House that brought it to a 49-51 minority, the Militia, Police and Public Safety subcommittee that handily dispatches anything that could restrict gun ownership added another Dem and is now 5-2. “Ludicrous,” says Goddard.

House Democratic Leader David Toscano agrees and says the subcommittee makeup is “unproportional” to the nearly even split of the House.

Subcommittee No. 1 includes southern Albemarle’s delegate, Matt Fariss, a Republican from Rustburg. Fariss did not return phone calls from C-VILLE Weekly to explain why measures such as requiring family day care centers to lock up guns after a 4-year-old boy killed himself in Orange last spring or banning bump stocks—the device used in Las Vegas to slaughter 58 people and wound hundreds—failed.

“Every year we see this,” says Gay Einstein, who heads the Charlottesville Coalition for Gun Violence Prevention. “Bump stocks—really?”

Her group started after the December 14, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut. The inability to nudge Virginia legislators to support gun safety measures is depressing, says Einstein, despite increased interest in preventing mass murders. The group took a bus of 32 people down to Richmond in January to lobby.

Goddard says 113 firearms-related bills were introduced in the General Assembly this session, and his organization supported 83 of them. Of those, “81 have gone down,” says Goddard.

One of the two survivors is a bill state Senator Creigh Deeds carried that would put restrictions on gun possession on minors who were involuntarily ordered to undergo mental health treatment.

The other? A “stop gun violence” license plate. “The gun boys got really upset and threw everything at that one,” says Goddard, who wonders how gun violence can be stopped when legislators “can’t even abide the words on a license plate.”

Despite the steadfast defeat of firearms restrictions in Richmond, in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, high school slayings and the national student-led outrage, Toscano is calling upon fellow legislators to reopen the conversation. “There are three items worthy of discussion,” he says.

First, banning bump stocks. Second, banning the sale of assault weapons to people under 21. “If we could have prevented the sale of an AR-15, the Florida shootings would not have occurred,” he says. And third, a “gun prevention protective order,” which would allow a court to remove guns from someone deemed mentally ill and dangerous “like the guy in Florida,” a measure that has support in conservative and liberal camps, says Toscano.

He knows he needs help from across the aisle to get anything done as this year’s session winds down, and on February 27, he says, “I’m going to challenge Republicans to join us.”

Despite the steadfast defeat of firearms restrictions in Richmond, in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, high school slayings and the national student-led outrage, House Democratic Leader David Toscano is calling upon fellow legislators to reopen the conversation.

Categories
News

Alleged man with gun frightens Venable community

This was the scene for parents arriving at Venable Elementary this morning. Photo Alex Kent

Imagine you’re a parent driving up to your child’s elementary school and seeing it swarming with police cars. That was the scene this morning for moms and dads dropping off their kids at Venable Elementary School after a school employee spotted a man walking down Gordon Avenue with what appeared to be a shotgun.

Charlottesville Police got the call around 7:38am, immediately set up a perimeter and searched the school, nearby Lugo-McGinness Academy and the surrounding neighborhood, according to a release.

Alex Kent lives directly across the street from the school playground and he could hear police sirens as he was waking up. “About 20 feet away I could see a police officer with what was clearly an AR-15-style rifle,” he says. “It was a pretty surprising sight.”

He could see a second officer on the far side of the playground, also with a rifle, but saw nothing that looked like an active threat. “The officers were allowing people to walk by on the sidewalk and traffic was still moving as usual on 14th Street,” he says.

For Lindsay Neal, a police car went racing by her at the light at 14th Street and Grady Avenue as she headed to drop off her 6-year-old daughter, Ellie, a kindergartener at Venable. At the school, a teacher opened the car door and said, “Everything’s okay. We’re getting the kids in the classroom,” says Neal.

“I’m freaked out,” she says. “I kept seeing my daughter walking up the sidewalk into the school.” And she overheard a teacher say, “Are we on lockdown?”

Says Neal, “I didn’t know what to do.” She called her husband and circled around the block. The scene was chaotic, and she says she didn’t want to contribute to the confusion. Then she saw a cop near the parking lot in back of the school with a large rifle.

“That’s when I called my husband crying on the phone, saying, ‘It’s real,'” she says. She pulled over and called the school. After being put on hold, she talked to a counselor who was very reassuring. “He said, ‘This is very precautionary. There’s a police presence inside and out.'”

Neal says she felt confident in the staff at Venable. “I trust [Principal] Erin Kershner,” she says. “I trust her wholeheartedly.”

She says the school called her twice before noon with general updates.

Police say they’ll continue patrols around Venable and around other city schools.

Neal still wants to know about the man with the gun. “That’s so scary to me,” she says. “I had to really fight my instinct to go get my daughter.”

*The article’s original title was changed at 1:52pm March 30.