GOVERNOR'S VETO EXPLANATION

Pursuant to Article V, Section 6 of the Constitution of Virginia, I am returning this bill without my signature.

Both this bill and its counterpart, Senate Bill 978, suffer from the same flaws, chief among them that they will be utterly useless in solving the problem they ostensibly are meant to solve. In fact, these bills are nothing but placebos, "feel-good" measures that sound good but will accomplish nothing, except to criminalize conduct that is perfectly lawful in the rest of this Commonwealth.

The bills apparently are meant to prevent people from using dangerous weapons to commit violent crimes in specified locations in Fairfax County. They apparently seek to accomplish this goal by enabling Fairfax County to adopt an ordinance making it a Class 1 or lower (SB 763) or Class 3 (SB 978) misdemeanor simply to possess a dangerous weapon in the locations rather loosely defined in the respective bills.

Let's use some common sense for once: no criminal who goes into a police station or recreation center (or, for that matter, public park, church, office building, hospital, theatre or any other place you could select) with the intent or predisposition to commit a violent crime is going to be deterred by a local ordinance under which he could be fined a few hundred dollars for possessing the dangerous weapons he intends to use to commit the violent crime. If that person murders, attempts to murder, or inflicts serious injury with that weapon he will land in prison for many, many years. If the prospect of spending much of his life in prison (or execution in the case of a capital murder) does not deter this particular individual, then why in the world would the threat of a minor monetary fine deter him? The obvious answer is: it won't.

That is why both SB 763 and SB 978 will do absolutely nothing to make Fairfax County safer.

If the bills, while ineffective, were nonetheless harmless exercises in symbolism, I could justify signing them. But they are not harmless. They will begin the process of creating an irrational patchwork of local laws and ordinances governing the possession of dangerous weapons. It is just bad public policy to make criminal the simple possession of, for example, a hunting knife, in certain locations in Fairfax County, while the same act is perfectly legal in Prince William, Loudoun or Fauquier Counties.

It is one thing for local governments to enact different civil laws in areas such as land use and zoning or whether liquor by the drink will be permitted or prohibited. But as a general principle, the criminal law ought to be as uniform as possible across the entire Commonwealth.