Gun Control Orgs Ready to Floor It in Virginia As Soon As Spanberger Takes Office.

On November 4, Virginia elected its first woman governor, Democrat Abigail Spanberger.

It also got something else: another chance to pass comprehensive gun reform, something the majority-Democrat General Assembly had tried to do for the past two years, but was stymied by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.

Youngkin has vetoed 42 gun reform bills since he took office in 2022, including an assault weapons ban, a prohibition on abusive dating partners owning guns, and a minimum age for rifle purchases, according to a Trace analysis. He vetoed 24 of those bills in 2024 alone. The following year, Democrats reintroduced 15 of the same bills — plus three new ones — knowing they had little chance of passage. Now, with Spanberger set to be sworn in on January 17, Democrats are mobilizing for another try.

“We’re not going to take our foot off the gas,” State Senator Adam Ebbin, who chairs the Legislature’s gun violence prevention caucus, told The Trace. Ebbin plans to reintroduce the bills he sponsored that were vetoed by Youngkin last year. “I know that we’ll have others as well who are strategizing on it currently,” he said of his fellow Democratic lawmakers. “So there’ll be a substantial gun safety package reintroduced. And I expect the bills to be signed.”

“We have consistently voted for gun safety reform, and our voters prioritize it,” Ebbin added. “Governor-elect Spanberger is on the right side of those issues.”

Spanberger, who represented the Fredericksburg area in Congress until this year, has been a gun reform advocate since before she embarked on a career in politics. A former CIA operations officer, Spanberger joined a local chapter of the gun reform group Moms Demand Action shortly after she left the agency in 2014, according to a Washington Post profile.

— Jennifer Mascia in Virginia’s Election of a Democratic Governor Primes the State for Gun Reform