Firearms

The gun-rights debate in Virginia is framed by the commonwealth’s experience of the deadliest school shooting in American history, which occurred in the town of Blacksburg on April 16, 2007. That morning, Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech with a history of mental illness, arrived on campus with a pair of semiautomatic pistols and proceeded to kill 32 of his fellow students before dying by suicide. He wounded 17 more, including Colin Goddard, who was sitting in his French class when Cho entered the classroom and shot him four times. After the shooting, Colin and his father, Andrew Goddard, “looked at what could be done in Virginia — what lessons could be learned,” Andrew Goddard told me. They attended a vigil for gun-violence victims hosted by the Virginia Center for Public Safety, a gun-control group, on the Capitol grounds in Richmond on Lobby Day in 2008.The event, Andrew Goddard recalls, was bracing. Gun rights activists gathered around the vigil participants, shouting, “Guns save lives! Guns save lives!” After Colin spoke, Goddard remembers, “They swarmed around my son and called him a coward for not shooting back.”Andrew Goddard later became the Virginia Center for Public Safety’s legislative director. Over the next decade, the organization and Van Cleave’s group faced off nearly every Lobby Day in demonstrations that neatly mirrored the social and political divisions of Virginia, which in turn mirrored the divisions of the country as a whole. The gun-control position was broadly identified with Democratic Virginia, the suburban professional class of the Greater Washington area and cities with large Black populations like Norfolk and Newport News. The gun-rights activists more often hailed from the state’s Republican south and west: predominantly rural, culturally Southern and Appalachian, mostly white.In the years after Virginia Tech, as the prospect of gun-control legislation receded, the standoffs cooled, until the 2016 election. “When Trump came into power,” Goddard said, “it was like the genie was let out of the bottle again.” The same election — in which Virginia went for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, the state’s junior senator, by more than five points — also revealed the extent to which Virginia’s rural conservatives were losing purchase on power; the northern suburban population was growing, and growing more Democratic. In 2017, the Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race. Two years later, Democrats won control of both houses of the State Legislature for the first time in a quarter of a century. One of the new majority’s first acts on arriving in office was to begin drafting gun-control legislation. “It’s clear that a majority of Virginians support these measures,” Northam told the Legislature as the session began. “They expect votes and laws to make Virginia safer.” Among the laws the Legislature took up was a “red flag” law allowing law-enforcement officers to temporarily seize firearms from someone deemed by a judge to be a public-safety risk. Red-flag laws already existed in the District of Columbia and 18 other states, and their discretionary scope had made them a particular object of fury among gun rights hard-liners. In November 2019, a 28-year-old Army veteran, Alexander Booth, had Instagrammed in real time a standoff with police officers in Mahopac, a town in upstate New York — which has a red-flag law — over what Booth claimed was their intention to seize his ammunition. In fact, they had come on a domestic-violence call, but his broadcast went viral, as did a hashtag he added: #boogaloo. More