Keeping Guns Out Of Unsafe Hands

2024 Top Legislative Success!

Safer Country supports all the common sense gun safety reform bills that are moving through the 2024 Virginia legislative session and are going to the Governor’s desk for a signature.  (We will be posting the details of all those bills on our Safer Country Facebook page.  For a list of our positions in general, scroll to the bottom of this page.)

Safer Country is excited to report that one piece of legislation was drafted and introduced as a result of a new legislator attending our November fundraiser and conversing with our longtime Advisory Committee member and newest Board member, Andrew Goddard.   HB916E, introduced by Delegate Kannan Srinvasan, would require the “State Police to establish a Substantial Risk Order Reporting System for the purpose of tracking and reporting the entry of orders issued…”  Of course, names and other personal identifying information would not be published on the website that would provide valuable transparency.

We will report here and on our Facebook page what action the Governor takes on this and all the other bills he can sign or veto.

Although not added to legislation this session, Safer Country is working to change the state firearms brandishing law to add a critical penalty if convicted of the misdemeanor charge – the removal of the right to carry a firearm for a minimum of ten years.

This Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit from December 9, 2023 is an example of illegally brandishing a firearm.  This is a dangerously funny skit.  What’s not humorous is that in a nation with more and more people using guns to express their anger towards others this skit won’t do anything to reduce that problem.  Airing this was extremely poor judgment.

Read Safer Country Executive Director Paul Friedman’s 10/10/23 Op/Ed on Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s refusal to take federal funds to prevent mass shootings and suicides, including military suicides.

It was published in the Richmond Times Dispatch and republished in The Daily Progress in Charlottesville.

Learn about the Gun Violence & ERPO (Extreme Risk Protection Order) Study.

This study was commissioned by The Joyce Foundation.