Please consider contacting Virginia legislators about supporting legislation that will help protect Virginians from the ravages of gun violence by closing gun background check loopholes; implementing Extreme Risk Protection Orders in Virginia; and banning assault firearms, high capacity magazines, bumpstocks, and silencers.
In 1993, the Brady Law was signed by President Clinton to implement the national system of background checks on gun sales. Since the law was enacted, over 300 million background checks have taken place, and over 3 million firearm sales to prohibited gun purchasers have been stopped. But holes in Virginia’s gun laws mean that too often guns purchased in Virginia still fall into the wrong hands. One in five gun sales are still conducted without a background check — through gun shows, private sales, antique dealers, and over the internet in online sales--even though more than 90 percent of Americans agree that anyone who buys a gun should go through a background check.
Extreme risk laws give family members, law enforcement, and sometimes other key individuals — for example, health professionals or school administrators — an avenue to prevent a person in crisis from harming themselves or others by petitioning a court to temporarily remove guns from them and prohibit them from purchasing additional firearms. As such, they provide law enforcement with the tools to decrease mass shootings and firearm suicides. Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., have enacted versions of extreme risk laws and studies of Connecticut’s and Indiana’s extreme risk laws have been shown to reduce firearm suicide rates in these states by 14% and 7.5%, respectively.
Assault weapons and large capacity magazines have been used in many of the deadliest shootings in the U.S. Neither assault firearms nor large capacity magazines are necessary for self-defense and both greatly increase shooters' ability to inflict devastating carnage. For example, the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut equipped his assault weapon with 30-round magazines, which enabled him to fire 154 rounds in less than 5 minutes killing 27 persons, including 20 first-graders, and the shooter in Dayton, Ohio, earlier this month used an assault weapon with a 100-round magazine to kill 9 people in less than 30 seconds. Similarly, silencers, also known as "suppressors" are not needed for self defense and also increase the potential for carnage in mass shootings. Silencers not only make it harder for victims to recognize that a shooting is occurring and flee the scene, but make it easier for shooters to elude law enforcement.
Please consider signing SALT's letter to Virginia legislators and adding your own comments to the letter.
You can access and send the letter to Virginia legislators by clicking on this link or by copying and pasting this link into your Internet browser: https://s-a-l-t.org/salt-advocacy/end-gun-violence-letter-to-va-legislators.html.
