Virginia lawmakers — in Congress and the General Assembly — vowed on Thursday to intensify their efforts to reduce gun violence after a gunman killed two people and wounded five others after graduation ceremonies for Huguenot High School this week outside of the Altria Theater in Richmond.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., included a ban on assault rifles as well as gun safety measures that Virginia already adopted - in a new legislative package aimed at helping the country recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on mental health, particularly among young people traumatized by shootings in schools and other public places once considered safe from mass violence.
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"There used to be places in our society that were safe places. ... There's no safe place left," said Kaine, a former Virginia governor and Richmond mayor. He recalled how two of his three children graduated from Richmond Public Schools in ceremonies at the Altria Theater, formerly known as The Mosque and Landmark Theater.
"I feel shocked. I feel helpless," he said in a press briefing hours before speaking on the Senate floor about the tragic shooting that left a Huguenot graduate and his stepfather dead outside of the theater next to Monroe Park, and five others wounded. "I feel like the adults of the world are letting the kids of the world down."
In the General Assembly, House and Senate Democrats promised action in a new legislature that will meet for the first time in January. "We cannot continue to watch as young lives are taken from us," House Minority Leader Don Scott Jr., D-Portsmouth, said in a statement with five other Democratic leaders. "This epidemic of senseless murder and gun violence must end - and as leaders from both sides of the aisle we have the power to end it by passing common sense gun violence prevention."
Democrats say they want to see more attention paid to the "root causes" of gun violence, which vary among communities, while Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Republicans push law enforcement initiatives such as Operation Cease Fire and Operation Bold Blue Line. Both approaches are reflected in the competing House and Senate budgets, with a final budget agreement likely after legislative primary elections on June 20, House Appropriations Chairman Barry Knight, R-Virginia Beach, said this week.
"We're going to do some of both," Knight said in an interview on Wednesday.
"If there's anything they show us that can help reduce gun violence, that's a good pragmatic approach, we'll go along with it," he added.
Youngkin this week renewed his call for tougher penalties for gun violence, saying perpetrators must be held accountable. In recent months he also has made an overhaul of the state's behavioral health system a top priority. His three-year plan, “Right Help, Right Now,” includes $230 million in additional spending for the mental health system in the first year.
Youngkin remains committed to the initiatives he pushed in the budget that he introduced in December, but spokesperson Macaulay Porter said, "The Senate and House budgets have very similar proposals to address group violence intervention that build off the budget signed last year."
"As the investigation into the recent tragic shooting continues, the governor is dedicated to providing additional resources to victims and witnesses, and funding community partnerships to help stop violent crime before it happens," Porter said Thursday.
Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-4th, mother of two children in Richmond Public Schools, is working in Congress, as she did in the Virginia Senate, to invest money in grants for communities to directly address the root causes of gun violence.
The pending state budget that the Virginia Senate approved includes $24 million for the Firearm Violence Intervention & Prevention Fund that she helped establish last year. It would retrieve $4 million that Youngkin redirected last year from the fund to Operation Ceasefire, an initiative overseen by Attorney General Jason Miyares, and would include an additional $20 million for community grants.
The idea behind the fund is to allow communities to identify and address the causes of gun violence – mental health, poverty, domestic violence, disputes among families and friends.
The proposed Senate budget also includes $3 million for the Delinquency Prevention and Youth Development Act, which she sponsored last year to complement a federal law and funding.
“If you want to do something, the common ground should be, ‘Let’s investigate the root causes,’ ” McClellan said.
After Tuesday's shooting in Richmond, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, elected in a Republican sweep of statewide offices two years ago, showed up uninvited at a news conference of city officials and blamed them for lax law enforcement against gangs.
Her remarks incensed Democrats, including Sen. Lamont Bagby, D-Henrico, who attended his son's graduation on Thursday from Highland Springs High School just over a year after a sophomore on the school's state championship men's basketball team was shot to death.
"She yelled about gangs. That's yelling and screaming about the wrong thing," Bagby said Thursday afternoon. "It's not gang related. There's a difference in having a conflict as individuals and conflict as groups. I don't think she understands how dangerous her comments are."
Bagby, chairman of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, wants the state to tighten laws to make gun owners more responsible for safely storing their weapons, as legislation adopted by the Senate and killed by the House this year would have done. He wants a ban on assault weapons, rejected by the Senate from a package of gun-control legislation enacted in 2020.
He also wants more tools for communities for conflict resolution, especially among young people who resort to violence to settle an argument, and he considers the approach advocated by the Senate budget to be "critical."
"It's much, much better than the fake, tough-on-crime legislation that Youngkin has," Bagby said.
Kaine, who said Earle-Sears' remarks "seemed out of place," wants Congress to adopt the same laws that Virginia enacted three years ago, plus a ban on assault weapons. The state laws adopted in 2020:
- raise penalties for “recklessly” exposing minors to guns;
- require reporting of lost or stolen firearms;
- ban possession of firearms by people subject to restraining orders;
- expand local control over firearm ordinances;
- require universal background checks;
- limit handgun purchases to one a month; and
- give courts the ability to temporarily remove firearms from people in crisis.
But Kaine is including the gun-control measures in a broader package of community safety, education, health and economic reforms aimed at helping Americans recover from the pandemic that began more than three years ago and ended, officially, on May 11.
Easy access to guns is part of the problem, he said, but so is mental health, especially among young people.
"The pandemic has put so much stress on people's lives, and when you put people who are already stressed under more stress, then bad things happen," he said.
And when bad things happen - at an elementary school in Newport News, a football team's trip at the University of Virginia, a Walmart in Chesapeake or a high school graduation in Richmond - the trauma doesn't go away.
"If one of the five happiest days of your life, your high school graduation, is perverted into a chaotic pandemonium of violence, you're going to remember that for the rest of your life."
This is continuing Times-Dispatch coverage of a shooting that killed two after a Richmond high school graduation ceremony.