RICHMOND, Va. (CN) — Gun rights advocates in Virginia are growing frustrated as Democrats in the commonwealth seek to use their legislative majority to toughen up gun safety laws.
"It's a full-out war on gun owners," Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said in a phone interview. "All the stuff ends up restricting the rights of law-abiding people."
From requiring locking devices to banning assault weapons, Democrats have introduced dozens of gun violence prevention bills they claim to be common-sense legislation. After the party maintained control of the Virginia Senate and took over the state House of Delegates in November 2023, the proposed bills have faced little trouble passing through committees.
The proposals will need Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin's seal of approval before any become laws.
Democrats were left frustrated last session after the House, then controlled by Republicans, struck down gun control legislation.
"It's now time for Governor Younkin to listen to the voters, and we'd call on Governor Youngkin to join us and sign into law the gun violence prevention bills that we will see shortly sent to his desk," state senator and co-chair of the General Assembly's gun violence prevention caucus Adam Ebbin said at a press conference Thursday.
Youngkin spoke on gun control last month during his annual State of the Commonwealth address.
"We know a majority of violence is related to drug and gang activity," Youngkin told the legislature. "Virginia's gun laws are already among the toughest in the nation."
Democrats and gun rights advocates have locked horns on the most effective way to combat violent crime.
Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League claims that if Democrats truly cared about reducing gun violence, they would support laws imposing stricter penalties for felons.
"None of it's aimed at criminals. Let's actually talk about putting criminals in jail," Van Cleave said. "When you start talking about felonies on some of this stuff — oh, no, no, no, we can't do that. Let's go after the law-abiding, and we'll punish those bastards."
Co-founder of March for our Lives and Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor David Hogg joined the caucus for Thursday's press conference and emphasized being proactive in combatting gun violence rather than relying on locking up offenders after they commit violent crimes.
"We can't just talk only about how somebody gets a gun, although that's very important," Hogg said.
"We also need to address: Why does somebody pick up a gun in the first place? We have to address the systemic poverty that drives gun violence, the systemic racism that drives gun violence, an incarceration system that is not built on restoring people, but simply punishing them after they've done wrong in the first place."
State Senator Jennifer Boysko and Delegate Marcus Simon introduced identical bills to make it a class 4 misdemeanor for gun owners not to store their firearms in a locked container if they live with a minor or someone otherwise prohibited from using a gun. The bill passed through the Senate on Thursday, a little over a year after a Virginia first-grader used his mother's gun to shoot his teacher.
Democrats also seek to ban firearms on public college campuses. In 2007, 23-year-old student Seung-Hui Cho committed one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, killing 32 people and wounding 17 others at Virginia Tech.
Virginia saw a pair of campus tragedies in 2022 when Alexander Wyatt Campbell killed two campus police officers at his alma mater Bridgewater College in the Shenandoah Valley, in addition to University of Virginia student Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. opening fire on a bus and killing three classmates and injuring two others.
Van Cleave argued that college students are still entitled to their Second Amendment rights.
"This whole distrust of 'every student is an idiot and can't be trusted if they have a gun,'" Van Cleave said; "they're an adult. They have certain rights."
State Senator Jennifer Carrol Foy hopes to hold the firearm industry accountable with her bill that creates standards for preventing the sale or distribution of a firearm-related product to straw purchasers, among other provisions.
Van Cleave questioned why automobile companies aren't responsible for drunk drivers who cause deaths or injuries.
"This is not trying to hold the industry accountable," Van Cleave said. "This is trying to destroy the industry."
State Senator Russet Perry introduced a bill prohibiting the sale and possession of auto sears, small devices made of metal or plastic that can make any handgun into a fully automated weapon. Auto sears are currently illegal on a federal level, but Perry said adding them to state law would give Virginians a vital tool to go after them.
In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, where the conservative majority found that New York violated the Second Amendment by restricting who gets to carry a concealed weapon in public. The ruling made carrying a gun publicly (with a license) a constitutional right and changed the standard for how courts determine if a gun control law violates the Second Amendment, setting off challenges to gun restrictions across the country.
Bruen supplied an analysis for courts centered on the Second Amendment's text and history, finding that if the Second Amendment's plain text covers an individual's conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. At that point, the challenged regulation is unconstitutional unless the government can show that the regulation is consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.
Courthouse News asked Perry, who has an extensive history as a prosecutor, whether the proposed Virginia bills would stand in court under Bruen's scrutiny.
Perry pointed to colonial-era laws that prohibited mentally ill people from possessing firearms as proof of a historical analog for limiting gun ownership. "I think that many, if not all, of these things that have been presented here today are things that will withstand the scrutiny of Bruen," she said.
Hogg told reporters he didn't want to be still lobbying for gun violence prevention laws six years after he survived the Parkland High School shooting that killed 14 of his classmates and three staff members. The 23-year-old gave the impression of someone worn out by years of inaction on gun control but with an optimism that Virginia is heading in the right direction.
"Act now so that your kids don't fear for their lives, so that your teachers don't fear for their lives, and your communities are kept safe," Hogg said.
"So that you never have to know the pain of what it's like to hear your 14-year-old little sister screaming after she's lost four friends from a gunman with an AR-15 that he legally obtained and was allowed to continue to legally own despite making multiple threats against my high school. Don't wait for that pain to come to your community."
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