Fairfax County Supervisors plan to once again seek a firearms ban in public facilities, a now-perennial vow that comes on the heels of both a controversial gun giveaway last week and last month’s massacre at Virginia Tech.
The General Assembly will meet in January in the first session since the April 16 shooting that claimed the lives of 32 students and faculty, as well as the assailant at the Blacksburg university. It remains unclear how the incident will alter the long-standing debate on gun control the assembly engage in each year.
Last year, the Fairfax County board unsuccessfully petitioned the legislature to extend a gun ban that currently applies only to court and school facilities to include all public buildings. Local officials are forced to seek the assembly’s permission because of the Dillon Rule that affords them only as much power as the state gives them.
Fairfax County officials and gun-control opponents clashed last week over a “Bloomberg Gun Giveaway” held at a government center in Annandale, organized by the Virginia Citizens Defense League to protest lawsuits by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg against Virginia gun dealers. After sparring over the legality of the gun raffle with the county, the league held the giveaway Thursday evening under protests from some residents and parents of slain Virginia Tech students.
Many of the raffle participants wore handguns at their sides.
“The legal question from the commonwealth’s attorney was resolved, but there still remains the fact that the largest local government in Virginia cannot ban dangerous weapons from public buildings,” wrote Chairman Gerald Connolly and Mason District Supervisor Penny Gross in a joint resolution Monday. “Indeed, supervisors cannot even post signs restricting weapons in their own offices.”
