Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has signed legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain semi-automatic firearms, prompting immediate lawsuits from gun-rights groups.
The limits on “ assault firearms,” as they are described by the legislation, are among two dozen new restrictions and regulations on guns enacted by the Democratic governor in her first few months in office. That marks a sharp policy reversal from her Republican predecessor, who had vetoed many similar measures.
“Firearms designed to inflict maximum casualties do not belong on our streets,” Spanberger said in a statement Friday. “We are taking this step to protect families and support the law enforcement officers who work every day to keep our communities safe.”
The new gun restrictions move Virginia closer to the likes of California, Illinois and New York, which similarly have full Democratic control of their legislatures and governors’ offices. They also highlight a continued national divide on gun policy, as various Republican-led states have taken steps to relax firearm restrictions that they describe as an infringement on Second Amendment rights.
I have always wondered how they can ban fully automatic machine guns, but then say that semi automatic assualt rifles can’t be banned while reading the same part of the constitution. They are both “arms”. The constitution doesn’t differentiate. Any differentiation made by the law is adding to what is written, clear as day. So just pick a damn side.
Why…just why?..Dems are just asking to lose midterms. Stop fucking with gun control shit and focus on the goddamn fascist in power.
Spend your political capital on shit that’ll actually make a difference in not just gun but our overall violence numbers.
Raise the minimum wage
Increase education funding
Hire and pay teachers more
Stop techbros from planting DCs everywhere and firing their workers.
End the for profit prison systems
Get single payer healthcare passed
Kick ICE the fuck out of your state
End the war on drugs, which targets minorities the most
Enshrine abortion rights into law
Create proper safety nets for our most vulnerable citizens
Strengthen worker protection rights(unions)
Repeal anti-lgbtq+ laws
There is sooo much they could focus on that would solve our violence in general, but they go for this shit which just pushes away single issue voters and has others scratching their heads wondering wtf they’re doing.
What exactly are they going to try and go to trial for? They’ll still have guns, they just won’t have these really bad ones. What’s the fucking point in going to court over something so pointless? Just live with your stupid guns and STFU. You don’t need assault weapons to live. Get over it.
Those “assault weapons” account for around 150 deaths a year. That’s suicides, cops killing people and all others. They’re in common use and this ban will have zero effect on our gun violence. It’s grandstanding ignorance passing this law.
I got a funny feeling that they are wording these laws dumb as fuck purposefully. Like no one can define an assault weapon. An assault rifle has a definition of a gun with select fire, which is already illegal for most people to own!
“I got me ol’ assault musket in da shed. reckon I oughta bring it to the buyback program.”
These laws are written by groups that want to ban guns outright. They don’t have interest in actually learning anything about them, they just want to make it sound as scary as possible. That way it seems like a common sense baby step towards a full ban.
What if…
::dawns tinfoil hat::
It’s chuds playing 5-d chess and passing poorly worded laws intentionally so they get struck down in court to set a precedent?
Ohhhh theres the 2A folks, thought they all been tread on to death. Oops.
Morons.
Is there a bigger group of babies than gun rights advocates?
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It must be such an easy life to have zero self awareness
I’m almost envious at this point.
As opposed to all those rugged macho badass gun nuts who talk 2A all day then put on diapers and tape maxi pads to their heads to go worship a fascist pedophile.
That bunch chose the other side. They think they’re the south rising again.
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Guns do not hold the government in check, trade unions do.
Good thing she vetoed their collective bargaining too
Will it hold up in court? Who knows… Don’t forget she’s vetoing a bill to allow public employees to collectively bargain with the government.
Good, she already raised the minimum wage, the state needs to save up money.
Why shouldn’t they be able to?
The gun laws we need most are gun laws to disarm the police. Magically, they’re always exempted, even in personal capacities, even in the context of red-flag laws. It’s not like the police have a documented history of collective domestic abuse or anything.
It’s easier to ban them than it is to fix the actual issue.
I am a fan of making them much harder to obtain. Make it hunting license style or something that you can apply for that requires an evaluation and a gun safety course.
I hope all of this is repealed because it is taking a freedom away from us. I enjoy range day and this is something I’ve enjoyed for many decades and now is being taken away because of what? This won’t stop mental illness from hurting others.
Not to mention this is the worst time to disarm the populace, on the eve of what could easily turn into civil war.
How is banning them not fixing the issue? Less guns means less change of getting killed by a gun
Because 95+% of gun violence is via handguns and not the scary black rifles anti-gun groups say.
What you’re proposing just makes too much sense. But also, if I understood correctly, nothing is being taken away from you. It looks like this would just ban the ability to buy, sell, transfer, and manufacture specific stuff like foregrips, collapsible stocks, and magazines with a capacity higher than 15. What you already have is yours.
I’d like to see gun registration and insurance the way we have for cars. I work with a few gun nuts and it’s fucking ludicrous how many guns they have. One guy has 29. He actively hunts, and he doesn’t just hunt one thing, so I can understand that different tools are built for different jobs and he needs a few to be effective at everything. But realistically he only needs like 5.
If we actually wanted to do something about mass shootings, we would do reasonable gun control legislation like we’re talking about, but as a supplement to destigmatizing psychological help, making healthcare (including mental healthcare) attainable for all, and ensuring basic needs like food and housing are met. Get that shit done and I’ll concede that America is “great again” now. But I’m only hearing a couple of people in office even pretend to be on board with these very basic ideas.
The way it is written now is I can no longer buy a sport .22 pistol because the magazine has the capability of being over 15. This is legal to buy and own in Europe but now illegal in Virginia.
Gun maintenence is a thing. Parts need to be replaced over time. Upgrading or changing out parts is a thing. This is effectively stopping us from replacing certain parts if they break. If I want to sell what I have and buy something else, I can no longer do it.
For target shooting, a single round capacity is sufficient. You only need multiple rounds if you’re trying to kill something.
Maybe if you don’t do shooting sports…but I’m assuming since you’re on a .uk instance you’ve never been near a firearm.
In the USA, we have a lot of shooting sports that are not single shots. They’re about speed and precision. Check out 3gun or IDPA.
People used to play lawn darts too. They got over it.
Yea I forgot how there is an amendment for law darts.
And law darts shouldn’t have been banned…dumb people will hurt themselves over bubble wrap if they can.
You can absolutely buy smaller capacity magazines for a .22 pistol.
Yes, gun maintenance is a thing. And yes, you can’t replace the banned parts. I agree that this ban isn’t gonna do anything to change gun violence, but that’s because it doesn’t do much of anything at all. So what if you can’t replace your foregrip or collapsible stock? You still have the gun itself. The only thing this legislation really changes is that people who don’t already have these things won’t get them, and 20-40 round magazines will phase out as they break and can’t be replaced.
You’re partially right that you can’t sell what you have to buy something else. Just remove these aftermarket parts first. The gun itself seems to still be fully legal.
A better law would be to restrict the ownership of assault firearms until a person is 23 years old. The reasoning is mental illness or criminal behavior preventing a person from owning firearms would manifest themselves by then.
Except when it doesn’t. The justice system is disproportionately targets minorities because stacking charges, public defenders, and the threat of egregious sentencing being reduced if one just “takes the deal” is a quadruple win. The accused loses their gun rights, usually their voting rights, can be used for slave labor legally, and the general public sees “felon” and assumes they shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun in the first place. The regime has been pushing Trump Derangement Syndrome and that trans identity is a mental illness, the democrats will get their mental illness red flags passed and the regime will turn right around and use that as an excuse to strip their enemies of their guns. There is currently no legislation that will not be used, abused, and corrupted for their own goals by this regime.
Gun ownership in the US is not about overthrowing your government, it’s about the last resort of protecting yourself and your community when all the Rittenhouses of the nation get told it’s open season on enemies of the state.
That’s the reason to accept my proposal. Ownership of assault firearms would be prohibited until age 23. The government cannot strip people of owning guns unless they have a criminal record or certain mental illnesses.
If the United States had a better track record of writing and enforcing laws in good faith, I would agree. If the US had a history of having concern for mental health, I would agree. But for years the ability to strip felons of the right to vote and their gun rights has been behind the ever increasing amount of felony level offenses as well as the dubious practice of law enforcement being aware of crime but waiting to intervene until they have a laundry list of charges rather than busting someone in the act of a lesser crime they know is being committed. Defendants are overcharged, often times with accusations that wouldn’t stick if they took it to trial, but public defenders are overburdened, work for the state, and are pressured to get clients to take a plea deal under the promise of dropped charges, lighter sentence recommendations, alternative sentencing. It’s one of the greatest abuses of our legal system.
The easiest solution for our government to get around the pesky Constitution and its inalienable rights was to create a subclass, the felon, that society generally agrees doesn’t deserve those rights. But since they write the laws they can always make up new felonies and create more felons. I want to be clear, I’m not advocating for all felons to get their rights back, nor pretending like every felon is some innocent victim of a corrupt system, but the system is corrupt and abused at a lot of levels and I think that our current government is going to twist it even more to target their political enemies, either through incarceration or the threat of it. I think mental health flags under them would be even more dangerous because, what’s the baseline? Again, they make the laws and rules, they’ll make them to favor their beliefs, enforce them when it weakens us, continue to ignore the rantings and ravings on Facebook of their own so long as their targets are undesirables.
We’ve got bands of masked, unidentifiable men going door to door kidnapping, abusing, and murdering people. We have no idea if these people are actually ICE or enjoying the anonymity and indulging in violence, and the regime probably doesn’t care either way. I think it’s a dangerous time for the people and leaders of the opposition to be giving their enemies more new options to strip us of our rights and make it harder for their constituents to protect themselves against faceless mobs. I also think we need to have a national discussion about our criminal justice system and if everything we consider a felony is actually worthy of that definition and what restorative justice entails.
You have reasonable proposals, but our government has a history of using it’s power unreasonably.
Way to many anti-gun people do not understand what you just said.
You nailed it though. Good to see someone else here on lemmy gets it.
From the Mulford Act to the flip MAGA made when condemning Alex Pretti for legally carrying the message is clear, rules for thee no me. You can already see it in how cops deal with an armed white man vs an armed black man, one if far more likely to be “talked down”, though in the past few years they have gotten pretty trigger happy with anyone. Gun violence is a problem in the US, but as we head into what’s looking to be elections gerrymandered to hell, Jim Crow tactics, voter intimidation, and probably blatant cheating, I see no reason to believe this regime is going anywhere any time soon. He’s not building a bunker for the security of future presidents, he’s not labeling his enemies as deranged, anti-fascist trans anarchists hellbent on destroying straight white Christian America, he’s telling us what his next target is. He’s always played with his cards showing, daring us to call him out for cheating and rigging the game. He told us what he was going to do to the immigrants, and by extension anybody of color regardless of citizenship, and he did. His goons murder and beat observers in the streets for recording them, or less, then get a million dollar crowdfunded bounty and transfer to another town on taxpayer dollars with the boon of qualified immunity. They control the courts, Congress has been neutered, law enforcement does not serve and protect the community, there’s no shortage of wannabe murderers seeking excuses to pick a fight and take the gamble they’ll be exonerated, and depending on where you live, they will.
And you know what, if I’m wrong and in the next couple of election cycles we vote MAGA out, fucking great!!! But Trump is always blunt about his plans and next he’s coming for his political enemies that aren’t as easily identified by the color of their skin or the sound of their accent.
Yep, and this is why I don’t understand the Dems doing this shit. Like a large portion of your base is quietly getting armed. So parading around gun control is just political suicide right now.
I don’t get it either but chalk it up to sticking to traditional party rhetoric and policy making even as MAGA undermines every principle of democracy and the judicial system. I know I can come off as a doomer but the attitude out of some democrats that it’s still business as usual and that the pendulum will do like it’s always done and shift back in the next couple of elections seems dangerously naive. The governor mentions the move is for “the protection of our law enforcement officers”. Lady, if Trump demanded your arrest tomorrow those same cops would mask up, kick down your door, and haul you off without a warrant. I don’t think Democratic officials can protect themselves from the regime should it turn on them, much less their constituents. It’s been citizens who’ve fought ICE in the streets and pushed them out of neighborhoods, not their governors, and definitely not their local cops. For once I’m glad I live in a state where my strongly worded letters can be written in 30 rounds.
You dont need them. You aren’t using them to overthrow our current government, which is why that amendment was there. All that they are being used for is mass shootings.
Pretty much every mass shooting has been done with handguns.
Black plastic rifles, which are in common use, are just the scary thing that anti-2a groups latch onto.
This legislation will do nothing to stop gun violence because almost all gun violence is done with handguns.
