Tonight Abigail Spanberger signed four gun bills into law and sent two more back to the Virginia House with amendments that made them worse, not better. This…
The bottom line
Tonight Abigail Spanberger signed four gun bills into law and sent two more back to the Virginia House with amendments that made them worse, not better. This was not compromise. She did not pull back. She used the amendment process to sharpen the blade before she drives it in.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
How tonight happened
April 14, 2026 is going to be one of the most consequential days in Virginia gun law history. That is not hyperbole. I’ve been tracking this package of 18 gun bills for months, and the deadline for Spanberger to act was tonight. She could sign any bill, veto it, send it back to the House with recommended changes, or let it lapse into law automatically at midnight. She chose to move fast.
When the dust settled on the first wave of action, four bills had been signed outright and two had been returned to the House. The Virginia Legislative Information System had not even caught up yet when I was working through this. I was going off my contacts and real-time tracking on stopspamburger.com. That is how fast this moved.
The four signed bills are law now. They haven’t taken effect yet but they are on the books. The two returned bills are in a different category: they go back to the House, and the House has to vote on whether to adopt the governor’s changes. In both cases, Spanberger’s proposed changes made the bills more restrictive, not less.
That is the detail that matters. When you see a governor send a bill “back with amendments” people often assume it means she had second thoughts. She did not have second thoughts. She had a pen.
The four that are now law
HB91 is a massive expansion of Virginia’s red flag law. Before tonight, only a prosecutor or a law enforcement officer could petition a court to strip someone of their firearms without a trial. That already violated due process. The Supreme Court in Caniglia v. Strom (2021) reaffirmed that the community caretaker exception does not justify warrantless home entries, and red flag petitions operate on similarly thin constitutional footing. But at least the old Virginia law kept the pool of petitioners narrow.
HB91 blew that open. Now 18 categories of people can petition to have your guns removed. The list includes immediate family members, household members, intimate partners, doctors of osteopathy, marriage therapists, social workers, and the “designee of a local community services board.” If you have ever had a contentious breakup or a falling-out with a family member, your Second Amendment rights now depend on whether that person decides to make a phone call. There is no trial. There is no jury. The order can be issued before you ever have a chance to respond. This is what due process looks like in the Spanberger era.
HB626 bans firearms on all public university campuses statewide. Previously, individual universities got to set their own policies. Some allowed carry, some didn’t. That regime was imperfect, but it at least acknowledged institutional discretion and created spaces where lawful carry was possible. HB626 eliminates that entirely. Every campus in Virginia is now a gun-free zone. The penalty is a Class 1 misdemeanor. If you are a parent picking up your kid from a college dorm and you have your concealed carry permit on you, you are now committing a crime. The NRA-ILA flagged this one explicitly in their April 14 coverage, noting that “no CHP exemption” was a deliberate design choice.
HB110 creates a $500 civil penalty for leaving a firearm visible in a parked vehicle. The bill was originally a Class 4 misdemeanor and was downgraded before passing. I’ll be honest: I don’t love having to fight for the right of people to be careless with their guns in public. Don’t leave your firearm on the seat of your car. But the principle matters. You are the victim when your gun gets stolen. A civil penalty on the victim while the thief walks is exactly the kind of inverted logic that defines this entire legislative session.
HB916 overhauled the training requirements for Virginia’s Concealed Handgun Permit. The original bill specifically named the NRA and the USCCA and prohibited them from offering qualifying courses. That language was removed in later iterations, but the intent was never hidden. This was a targeted shot at two major Second Amendment organizations, an attempt to cut off their revenue stream and make the CHP process more bureaucratic. Will people go to jail over this? No. Does it show how deeply these legislators despise the organizations that exist to protect your rights? Absolutely yes.
The two that got sent back worse
The more revealing story tonight is not the bills that were signed. It is the bills that were returned to the House with Spanberger’s recommended changes.
HB229 is the mental health hospital weapons ban. The initial bill already created a broad new gun-free zone covering any facility providing mental health services or developmental services. That included private hospitals with psychiatric units and any hospital providing developmental therapy. If you have an autistic child and you pick him up from a therapy appointment, you would be disarmed at the door.
Bad enough. But here is what Spanberger proposed changing.
The original bill had three exemptions. On-duty law enforcement and armed security in official capacity were exempt. Hospital employees with written authorization from management were exempt. And critically, people transported to the facility involuntarily under emergency custody orders were exempt. That third one mattered. It recognized that if someone is being brought into a mental health facility against their will, they might be a legal gun owner who was carrying lawfully, and criminalizing them in that moment was obviously wrong.
Spanberger’s recommendations removed all three of those exemptions. She removed the armed security carveout, meaning hospital security guards can no longer carry firearms inside the building they are hired to protect. She removed the hospital employee authorization, meaning a private hospital owner cannot authorize his own employees to carry on his own property. And she removed the involuntary detention exemption.
Think about what that last change means. If I have a mental health emergency and am taken to a hospital involuntarily, possibly while unconscious, I can now be charged with a crime for having had a firearm on me legally. That is the exemption she chose to strike. Not some fringe scenario, not some loophole being exploited, but the obvious protection for someone who had no say in entering the facility at all. There is no rational public safety justification for this. The only thing it accomplishes is catching more lawful gun owners in a legal trap they did not choose to walk into.
HB99 establishes 100-foot gun-free perimeters around election sites, absentee ballot drop-off boxes, and a broadly defined array of other election-related locations. I flagged this one months ago as one of the most dangerous bills in this entire session, not because of what it does to gun rights directly, but because of how it criminalizes ordinary behavior.
Ballot drop-off boxes can be placed on any street corner. There is no requirement that the placement be announced with adequate notice, no requirement that you be warned before you enter the perimeter. If there is a drop box installed near your house, your daily walk with your dog might make you a criminal. The maximum sentence is 12 months in jail. There is no intent requirement. You do not have to know the box is there. You just have to be within 100 feet of it while carrying, and you are a criminal.
I don’t yet know exactly what changes Spanberger proposed for HB99. The LIS site had not updated by the time I was tracking this. But given what she did with HB229, I am not optimistic. Her pattern tonight is clear.
What this tells us about the rest of the night
The NRA-ILA characterized tonight’s actions as “fake adjustments, real infringements.” That is exactly right. The amendments to HB229 are not moderation. They are a precision tool for catching more people. The strategy seems designed to push the most visible and politically explosive bills, like SB749, the assault weapons ban, past the April 21 redistricting referendum date, while quietly making the rest of the package more damaging in the meantime.
The redistricting referendum was ten days away. Virginia voters approved a Democratic-drawn congressional map in that April 21 special election that gave Democrats a shot at four additional U.S. House seats. Spanberger does not want headlines about banning AR-15s while that vote is live. So she is processing the less visible bills now, quietly, at night, while making them worse with amendments that the political press barely notices.
I have been saying all day that this is the biggest day for Second Amendment rights in Virginia in at least a decade. I stand by that. But what I did not fully account for is how deliberately the damage is being packaged. She is not just signing bad bills. She is engineering the sequencing and the content of the amendments to maximize harm while minimizing political cost to herself. Understanding that matters if you want to understand what is going to come next.
Five more bills are still outstanding. The assault weapons ban. The semi-automatic carry ban. The under-21 handgun purchase restriction. The mandatory gun buyback program. And more. We are not done tonight.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
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