Gov. Abigail Spanberger made a show out of signing nothingburger legislation on Grounds at the University of Virginia on Tuesday that her office wants you to believe will “help law enforcement officers keep students, faculty, and staff safe on college and university campuses in the aftermath of the 2022 shooting at the University.”
How dare the governor’s office use the 2022 murders of UVA Football players Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis and D’Sean Perry to score a stupid political point, particularly because the bills she signed into law will do absolutely nothing to help anybody.
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The bills – SB 272, patroned by State Sen. Creigh Deeds, and HB 626, patroned by Del. Katrina Callsen – merely delineate that only law enforcement officers, ROTC cadets, and U.S. military personnel are permitted to carry firearms at public institutions of higher education in Virginia.
Seriously, that’s it.
This is basically a law that authorities will use to add to the list of charges for a suspect after a crime has been committed – not something that will be used to prevent a possible crime from being committed.
The existence of this language as being part of the Code of Virginia would have done nothing to protect Chandler, Davis and Perry on the night of Nov. 13, 2022, when they were shot and killed by a fellow UVA student, Christopher Darnell Jones, who also shot two other students.
Jones, who pleaded guilty to the mass shooting in 2024, is serving five life sentences plus 23 years for the crimes.
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“Right now, carrying a firearm on a college campus is prohibited — but only by regulation. That makes it harder for campus police to intervene, harder to enforce, and harder to protect students. By signing these bills into law, we are taking a commonsense step forward to keep students safe in Virginia,” Spanberger said today.
They want us to believe that this new law would have made it easier for the University to have dealt with Chris Jones, who had been the subject of a school investigation into a report that he was in possession of a gun that was later dropped because Jones wouldn’t cooperate with investigators.
It was discovered in the course of that investigation that Jones had been convicted in 2021 on a concealed weapons charge, and had not reported the conviction to the University as required.
The school prepared to refer the failure of Jones to report the conviction to a student-led judiciary committee for potential discipline, and after originally saying that this had been done, a school spokesperson clarified that the matter had in fact not been referred to the committee for further action.
Eff up after eff up after eff up after eff up.
An external review of the University’s actions in the Jones case conducted by the office of the then-current attorney general, Jason Miyares, was submitted to UVA in 2023.
University of Virginia leaders had initially pledged to make the report public, but later moved to delay the release, citing the potential impact on the criminal trial, and later only released a heavily-redacted version of the report.
So, we really don’t know if having this new law on the books would have been just something else for UVA to have dropped the ball on or not.
A better move by Sen. Deeds, Del. Callsen and then Gov. Spanberger would have been a bill that would mandate that UVA release the 2023 report wholly unredacted.
We all know, that ain’t never gonna happen.
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Chris Graham
