Something's going wrong in Virginia

By Skip Stiles

The legislature is set to repeal the one-handgun-a-month limit. I don't understand this at all.

Outside of collectors, do you know anyone who needs more than 12 handguns a year? Isn't a person who thinks he needs so many handguns someone to be avoided rather than pandered to?

Under current law, you can buy all the rifles and shotguns you want each month. The federal assault rifle ban expired, so throw those into the mix.

With all of this other firepower available, how can a sane person object to a limit of "only" one handgun a month?

(And assuming you are sane and need more than one handgun a month, you even can ask the State Police for an exemption from the limit.)

I grew up with guns. My dad was a national rifle team member in the Marine Corps. He helped get civilian rifle teams restarted after World War II and was awarded a lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association.

We hunted from the time I could lift my .410-gauge shotgun alongside his Remington 12 gauge. We spent weekends at the firing range. I am deaf in my left ear from banging too many rounds over too many years. There was always a loaded .38-caliber revolver under my dad's bed.

All to say, "I get guns."

My father eventually broke with the NRA as being too radical on gun rights. This legislative proposal continues the insanity that caused my Marine father to say "enough."

The other Saturday night I was at a gas station on Hampton Boulevard in Norfolk. Someone a few blocks away ripped off a clip from a handgun - anyone who has fired a weapon knows the sound.

Does this person need another handgun before the end of the month?

"Gun rights" advocates say these are legal and constitutional questions. They are, until this unidentified weekend celebrant with excess ammo sticks his gun in my face or shoots someone filling the gas tank, as happened two years ago at this same station.

I live in a community at the edge of some lawless folks. Many of them are armed. I'll grant them their one gun a month and glance around nervously under the neon of a gas station canopy as I fill my car's tank. But why do they need more handguns than that? What possible societal good do more weapons provide?

For those who have forgotten, the one-handgun-a-month limit was put into law after much study and debate. Its impact on exported "crime guns," guns used in the commission of crimes outside of the commonwealth, was dramatic.

The Virginia State Crime Commission found in 1995 that the law had significantly reduced the number of Virginia handguns used in crimes elsewhere. As a result of this law, Virginia dropped from first to eighth on a list of state sources of exported "crime guns."

The study also found that this law was not impinging on the rights of honest citizens to buy more handguns.

If you are a collector, own a business needing protection or just feel the urge to try out lots of handguns, there is an exemption process with the Virginia State Police, which approved 92 percent of the petitions to exceed the one-handgun-a-month limit.

The 1995 study concluded, "Law-abiding gun purchasers in Virginia are not unduly burdened by Virginia's one-gun-a month law."

This leads naturally to ask: If "law-abiding gun purchasers" are not unduly burdened by the law, who is?

I don't know for sure, but I hope the urban cowboy shooting near the gas station in Norfolk is, and will continue to be, burdened by the handgun-purchase limit.

In the debate on this bill to repeal the limit, Sen. Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax, observed that anyone buying one handgun a month for the past 20 years, the maximum allowed during the time the law has been in effect, would have 240 handguns today.

"If you need more than 240 handguns, something is wrong with you," Saslaw said. "Something has gone terribly wrong in your life."

With the progress of this legislation, something is going terribly wrong in Virginia.

Skip Stiles lives in Norfolk with his family and a 20-gauge Fox double-barreled shotgun.