Marcia Brown
Yorktown, Virginia, community members walk toward Grafton Middle School for the candidate forum on Wednesday evening.
YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA – “All topics are in-bounds tonight except one,” said the moderator of a candidate forum in a middle school auditorium in the southeastern Virginia town of Yorktown on Wednesday night. “Tonight we are not gonna talk about impeachment, we’re not gonna talk about Trump, we’re not gonna talk about Pelosi. We get enough of that every single day. That’s not what we’re here for.”
What the roughly 100 community members were there for was to hear candidates for office in next Tuesday’s election, in which every seat of the Virginia legislature will be up for grabs. While Democrats control Virginia’s statewide offices, Republicans cling to narrow majorities in both houses of the legislature, and Democrats have high hopes of winning control next week.
With pizza in hand, people milled between firetruck-red tables and chairs sized for middle schoolers before filing into the auditorium for the debate. And of all the issues they knew would be raised, perhaps the most contentious was guns. A recent poll showed that, after a succession of mass shootings, gun violence prevention is the most important issue to Virginians this cycle.
In this largely rural corner of Virginia, Republicans have long held sway, and while Democratic candidates took some Republican congressional seats here in the 2018 midterms, gun control is a topic that some Democrats handle gingerly. Just one candidate, Democrat Mark Downey, running for a seat in the legislature’s lower house, mentioned gun violence in his opening statement. “Any child that loses a life through suicide or accidental shooting is something that should not be tolerated, and we should not sit on our hands and do nothing,” said Downey, a pediatrician. “We’ve done nothing for 12 years since the Virginia Tech shooting and we’re still losing 1,000 Virginians every year.”
Marcia Brown
Trophies on display in the Grafton Middle School cafeteria where voters and candidates mixed before the debate started
While candidates were debating state policy and state law, Virginia’s status as the “iron corridor” gives these gun violence prevention measures national import. Christine Payne, a member of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, explained that Virginia’s laws allow people to buy guns in the state and then easily sell them out of state.
Mark Downey, candidate for House District 96, said in an interview after the debate that Virginians “can go to I-95 and sell [a gun] to someone in New York State and not have to report that gun as lost or stolen. When that gun gets used in a crime, [the seller] faces no personal responsibility.”
From Washington, D.C., to New York and beyond, law enforcement frequently traces weapons used in crimes back to Virginia, Payne said. Virginia once had laws limiting buyers to one gun per month and requiring that gun owners report lost or stolen firearms, before the National Rifle Association’s lobbying efforts swept them away.
“When we hear that crimes were committed in New York City with guns bought or sold in Virginia, it should remind members of our General Assembly that their votes have consequences that go beyond just their district or their constituents,” wrote Congresswoman Elaine Luria (D-VA). “I trust that a Democratic majority in the General Assembly will enact meaningful gun safety laws that will save lives in Virginia and across the country.” Luria, whose district includes the Virginia peninsula region, added, “While I’m not on the ballot this November, my values are.”
Herb Jones, a Democrat running for the state Senate seat held by Republican incumbent Thomas Norment Jr., argued that gun control laws are not inherently in opposition to protecting the rights of gun owners. “People talk about the Second Amendment,” he said, “but what they fail to realize is those first four words of the Second Amendment: ‘a well-regulated militia,’ By definition, we’re supposed to have regulation.” Jones is a gun owner, and served in the army for 30 years before retiring as a colonel.
“I’m not in favor of taking anybody’s weapon, but war weapons like AR-15s should be more difficult to get,” Jones continued. “They’re just too easy to get right now.” In the military, Jones told me, he trained on an M16, another form of assault weapon. He was shown a film of what happens to the body when hit by an M16. “It’s designed to inflict maximum damage on the body,” he said. “It’s not designed to maim, it’s designed to kill.”
The district Jones is running in, Senate District 3, is about 90 percent rural. Many residents want a firearm to protect their home, particularly since emergency response time is made slower by distance. But Jones says that if you let off 15 rounds from an assault-style weapon, “you’ve destroyed your home.”
Jones’s opponent, Norment, is the Republican majority leader in the Virginia Senate, and last May—notoriously, to many—helped shut down the special session of the legislature that Democratic Governor Ralph Northam called to deal with gun violence after 12 people had been killed and four wounded in the mass shooting in Virginia Beach, less than 50 miles from Wednesday’s candidate forum. The shooter had purchased several firearms legally in the three years prior, and had been involved in physical scuffles with colleagues prior to the shooting. His .45-caliber handgun had a legally purchased silencer attached during the shooting.
Marcia Brown
Historic Yorktown, now also a Revolutionary War tourist attraction, lies along the York River. Public buildings in Yorktown shut down on October 18 in celebration of Yorktown Day, which marks the anniversary of the American-French victory over the British in 1781.
Democratic Delegate Mike Mullin, who is running for re-election, said that he thinks gun violence prevention has been a major motivating issue for people in Hampton Roads since the Virginia Beach shooting—“particularly,” he said, “since in the peninsula, there have been a lot of communities overlooked in their struggles with gun violence.”
Mullin, who is also a prosecutor, said that gun violence is typically talked about in terms of mass shootings, but suicides and domestic violence are more common and often involve disadvantaged communities and communities of color. “When there’s a shooting in white communities, it’s in the newspaper, but in the black communities, it doesn’t show up,” he said.
Navigating the politics of gun violence prevention in Virginia can be challenging. But Mullin says that you have to start with the proposition that there can be a role for firearms in society, such as in law enforcement, recreational hunting, and the like. “Like all things, we have to assure that they’re done safely and without harming other people.”
Democrats go into Tuesday’s election needing just two seats to gain control in both the House of Delegates and the Senate, and having the majority means they will be able to pass an ambitious agenda that includes stricter gun control measures. National groups that advocate for gun violence prevention, including Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety, have become heavily involved in the races. Everytown has made 25 endorsements and has said it will spend at least $2.5 million before Election Day to elect Virginia candidates.
One change on the books won’t stop all gun violence, of course, and even stronger methods won’t get all guns off the street. “When I talk to communities in the peninsula, their neighborhoods are awash in guns,” Mullin said. “The sheer volume and access to firearms—[these changes] wouldn’t immediately be able to solve the problems of gun violence.”
But doing nothing is not an option. Democrats in Virginia see a majority nearly in their grasp, and—if they can attain it—the chance to begin solving this crisis. To Democrats, the argument that these solutions won’t work rings hollow when its proponents haven’t yet allowed any proposal to pass. “Who’s to say this wouldn’t have stopped this or that? Who knows? We haven’t tried!” said Jones.
“We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Mullin told me. “We can’t say because we’re not going to be able to stop every shooting, we shouldn’t stop some.”
