Who Needs More Than a Gun a Month?

Who needs to buy more than one handgun a month? And why?

Those were reasonable questions raised 17 years ago when the General Assembly approved then-Gov. Douglas Wilder’s proposal to limit the sale of weapons in the state’s fight against crime. That limitation to the purchase of one handgun (or pistol, if you prefer) a month reduced the proliferation of weapons traveling up and down Interstate 95 and the violence that accompanied them.

After taking a look at the rising number of murders involving handguns at the time, Virginia’s lawmakers rebuked the National Rifle Association and approved the measure. The new law effectively limited the spread of handguns in Virginia and put a dent in gun trafficking from the Old Dominion to the northeast.

And the law continues to limit the number of handguns floating around the streets of Virginia’s cities and towns.

But Del. Scott Lingamfelter, R-Woodbridge, wants to change that. He wants to repeal the one-handgun-a-month law so the state can once again become a supplier of weapons to such cities as Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York where stricter laws control gun purchases. He has offered a legislative proposal to accomplish that in the new General Assembly.

Why? The retired Army colonel said Virginians’ Second Amendment rights are restricted because they can legally purchase only one handgun each month. “We should not ration constitutional rights,” he said last week.

The last time we checked on the language of the Second Amendment, it said nothing about the number of weapons one could purchase in any time frame.

Lingamfelter has another reason for repealing the law. It’s about commerce, he says. Removal of the law, presumably, will speed up the sales of guns, and those ringing cash registers are good for business. Never mind that the proliferation of guns will add to the danger on the streets of Woodbridge or Lynchburg or wherever in Virginia.

During the debate in 1993, when the bill was approved, gun dealers admitted that multiple sales of guns on a daily or weekly basis were creating a problem for police in some other jurisdiction. They also acknowledged the hypocrisy of putting individual rights and the profit motive ahead of concern for public safety.

Lingamfelter apparently has not talked to any of those gun dealers who clearly worried about the potential impact of multiple gun sales.

He offered a similar bill last year that would have applied only to active duty members of the Armed Forces or the Virginia National Guard. The idea — flimsy at best — was to allow them to buy more than one firearm at a time for protection of their homes while they were deployed.

The measure passed the House of Delegates, but was rejected in the Senate. If members of the Senate ask themselves who needs to buy more than one handgun a month and why, they will quickly come to the conclusion this time around that there’s no good reason to repeal the one-gun-a-month law.