OPINION:
Every legislative session, Richmond Democrats roll out the same package: assault weapons bans, public carry prohibitions, storage mandates and liability traps for manufacturers.
The pitch is always the same: We must act to stop the violence. Yet the question no one in the majority wants to answer is: Whose violence and whose rights are we really talking about?
I represent Patrick County and the surrounding communities of Southwest Virginia. My constituents are farmers, veterans, small-business owners and working families. They own firearms for hunting and home defense, and because they live miles from the nearest law enforcement response.
For them, a gun is not a political symbol. It is a practical tool and a constitutional right they exercise responsibly, day after day, without incident.
When the Virginia General Assembly enacts legislation banning so-called assault weapons, restricting where law-abiding citizens can carry or mandating storage requirements that make a firearm effectively useless for self-defense in the middle of the night, it doesn’t target the source of Virginia’s gun violence.
It targets my constituents and millions like them across rural America who have nothing to do with that problem and are being asked to surrender their rights to solve it.
The data is not ambiguous. Virginia’s gun violence is concentrated in communities marked by poverty, economic despair and the breakdown of civic institutions. The murders that drive the statistics are occurring in circumstances that existing laws already cover.
Violence touches every corner of Virginia, and rural communities are not immune, but concealed handgun permit holders in Patrick County aren’t the ones creating these statistics.
Prohibitions don’t disarm criminals. They disarm the farmer in Franklin County who bought an AR-15 and kept a 30-round magazine loaded because he has watched coyotes tear into his newborn calves at the tree line and knows he may get only one chance to stop another attack. Take his rifle and see how that helps Richmond.
The constitutional dimension is settled law. The Second Amendment is not a suggestion, and the Supreme Court’s 2022 landmark ruling on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen made clear that restrictions on commonly owned firearms must be grounded in the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
Sweeping bans fail that standard. Last year, the high court ruled unanimously in Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos that firearm manufacturers cannot be held liable for the criminal misuse of their products by third parties. The court held that a manufacturer does not become an accomplice to violence simply because someone somewhere misused a product it lawfully made and sold.
Democratic Virginia state Delegate Dan Helmer’s gun industry liability bill runs directly into that wall. Virginia Democrats have already set aside $5 million for Attorney General Jay Jones to defend the other lawsuits in this package. That is your money, budgeted to lose.
The harder conversation, the one that might actually save lives, is about a criminal justice system that too often treats every defendant identically. When you stack charge after charge, layering additional firearms offenses onto young men — disproportionately young Black men who already face the heaviest prosecutorial burden in the system — you are not solving a violence problem.
Instead, you are processing human beings through a machine that has already decided the outcome. The system needs to grapple with who is actually driving violence, what circumstances produced them and what targeted interventions could change the trajectory. That requires individual accountability and individual attention, not the stripping of constitutional rights from people who have earned the right to be left alone.
I have standing to call this out because it is my constituents’ rights that are being erased. When Fairfax Democrats running for Congress push these bills through Richmond, they are not solving city violence. They are disarming my neighbors to give their donors something to celebrate while their constituents shoot one another. I will not be quiet while that happens.
My constituents are not the problem. They should not be asked to sacrifice constitutional rights they have exercised lawfully for generations because the majority needs a legislative victory to take back to Northern Virginia.
I will keep voting no on this package, every bill, every year, until the majority decides it is more interested in solving the actual problem than in punishing the wrong people for it.
• Delegate Wren Williams represents the 47th District in the Virginia House of Delegates. He is a lawyer practicing in Patrick County.
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