(featured image by Fox News)
Now that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s gun ban bill has been pushed to the Virginia Crime Commission to “study” the bill, HB961 is dead for this session. That doesn’t mean, however, that gun owners are out of the woods just yet. As David Adams, legislative chair of the Virginia Shooting Sports Association tells me on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co., it’s possible that Northam and House Democrats will insert the language banning modern sporting rifles, ammunition magazines with a 13+ round capacity, suppressors, and “trigger activators” into one of the gun control bills that is still alive this session.
House Democrats have already modified several of the gun control bills approved by the state Senate, and if the Senate doesn’t agree to the changes, those bills will head to a conference committee to iron out the differences. The same is likely to happen to gun control bills that originated in the House, but are now being considered by senators. Those conference committees aren’t public hearings, so gun owners won’t have a chance to attend. It also only takes a simple majority vote by the conference committee to send the modified bills to the floor of the House and Senate.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Northam to do this if the four Democrat senators who opposed HB961 remain firm in their opposition, but the governor is serious about getting something he can call an “assault weapons ban” to his desk, and he still has some room to maneuver legislatively.