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After Another Mass Shooting, Another Virginia Governor Tries to Change Gun Laws
After a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, a bill to require mandatory background checks for arms purchases at gun shows failed to make it out of committee in the Virginia State Senate. It was blocked by all of the Republicans on the committee and two Democrats, who controlled the chamber at the time.
Now, more than a decade later, and after a gunman killed 12 people in Virginia Beach last week, a similar background check bill is being proposed as part of a package of legislation to be considered in a special session, which Gov. Ralph Northam called for on Tuesday.
And State Senator John S. Edwards, a rural district Democrat who helped stop that bill in 2008, has a different read today.
“I think we’re ready,” he said.
The politics around guns have changed in recent years, recast by a burst of student activism, deep-pocketed allies and a steady dirge of grim headlines from schools, churches, concerts — and now a Virginia Beach municipal building. A major test of the current political temperature will come with the coming special session in Virginia, a rapidly suburbanizing state that has seen striking partisan changes. The longtime headquarters of the National Rifle Association sits in a county, Fairfax, that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by more than 36 points.
“This is a prime place to see how the politics of the issue of gun safety have shifted so significantly,” said Robin Lloyd, the managing director of Giffords, an advocacy organization.
The shift was seen starkly last year across state legislatures, which passed nearly 70 gun control measures, many in the immediate aftermath of the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla. The Parkland shooting took place in February 2018, when legislatures were already meeting and could act quickly; Mr. Northam’s decision to call the special session — in a year in which all of Virginia’s legislative seats are up for election — was an even clearer sign of the direction of political winds.
“Basically all the Democrats who run now, they run using gun safety as an offensive issue,” said United States Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who was governor at the time of the Virginia Tech shooting. Mr. Kaine said that Democrats running for statewide office back then were on defense when it came to gun issues.
When he called on Tuesday for the special session, Mr. Northam, who has been under fire for a scandal involving a racist photograph, spoke both of the Virginia Tech shooting and the shooting last week in Virginia Beach, in which a former city employee killed a dozen people in the city’s municipal center before being mortally wounded in a shootout with the police.
[Virginia Beach authorities have maintained near-silence about the gunman’s identity. Here’s why.]
Mr. Northam listed a number of measures he intended to propose at the session, which an aide said was planned for sometime this month. Those measures include universal background checks; a requirement that people report lost or stolen firearms; the reinstatement of a law, repealed in 2012, that would limit handgun purchases to one a month; and a ban on so-called assault weapons and related devices, including sound suppressors like the one used — and bought legally — by the gunman in Virginia Beach.
Similar bills have been proposed before, most of them before the recent legislative session, but died in Republican-controlled committees before reaching the floor of the Legislature. Republicans hold a slim majority in both houses.
This time, the governor said, he was demanding that the measures be put to a vote by the entire General Assembly.
“I will be asking for votes and laws, not thoughts and prayers,” Mr. Northam said.
In a statement, the National Rifle Association said that “none of the governor’s gun control proposals would have prevented the horrible tragedy at Virginia Beach,” and that he should focus on mental health issues and prosecuting violent criminals instead.
The likelihood that all or even most of the measures Mr. Northam has proposed would pass is slim, given that Republicans control both houses, if only barely. But political observers suggested that the changing politics of gun control could work in favor of state Democrats in the next election, as they try to overcome a series of scandals.
A 2017 Quinnipiac poll showed that a slim majority of voters in Virginia supported stricter gun control laws in general, while an overwhelming majority — 91 percent — supported universal background checks.
“This is how the politics of Virginia have changed so dramatically in just a few years,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. “For decades, any Democrat who talked about tightening the rules on guns was taking a big political risk. The risk in 2019, in the wake of the tragedy of Virginia Beach, would be borne by Republicans.”
In a statement, the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, Kirk Cox, a Republican, said that at the special session, Republican lawmakers would address gun violence “by holding criminals accountable with tougher sentences — including mandatory minimums,” rather than “infringing on the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.”
But Mr. Northam just last month pledged not to sign legislation that would impose minimum sentences for convictions after vetoing two such bills and writing in an op-ed that “mandatory minimums are disproportionately harming people and communities of color.”
Mr. Cox called the timing of the special session “hasty and suspect when considered against the backdrop of the last few months.” The state Republican Party was more direct, accusing Mr. Northam in a statement of trying to “take advantage of this tragedy to try and boost his own disgraced image.”
In early February, Mr. Northam gave conflicting accounts about appearing in blackface when he was younger, then responded to widespread calls for his resignation by pledging to focus on issues of inequity. Within days, Justin Fairfax, the state’s lieutenant governor, was accused by two women of sexual assault, and Mark Herring, the state attorney general, admitted that he wore blackface to a party in college.
The three stood together on Tuesday to call for the special session. It was their first public appearance together since all of the scandals surfaced, which perhaps attests to the new political power of gun control.
Republicans had seen those scandals as lifelines as they fought to hold onto their narrowest of legislative majorities this year. Now, with gun issues in the spotlight, political observers on both sides of the issue see the Republicans as facing the most political danger.
The question of whether this political calculation is right, and how much this state has really changed, will be settled soon.
“They’re forgetting about what they call the silent majority,” said Philip Van Cleave, the president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group. “There’s an election in November, and I imagine this will have real consequences.”
That hope is shared by Shelly Simonds, a school board member in Newport News, Va., not far from Virginia Beach. Last January, Ms. Simonds, a Democrat, tied her Republican opponent, David Yancey, in a race for the House of Delegates. She lost the seat — and the chances for a Democratic House — in a tiebreaker, when a state election official pulled Mr. Yancey’s name out of a bowl.
“I’m absolutely delighted,” Ms. Simonds said of the prospect of putting gun control measures up before the entire House of Delegates, including Mr. Yancey, whom she is running against again. “I can’t wait to find out how he votes.”
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the organization that Robin Lloyd works for. She is managing director of Giffords, not its policy arm, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
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Trip Gabriel contributed reporting.
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