Nine gun bills coming back April 22 -- here's what's actually at stake

The bottom line

On April 22, the Virginia General Assembly reconvenes to decide what happens to nine gun bills that Gov. Abigail Spanberger sent back with her own amendments. The House can concur with her changes, reject them and return the bills to her desk unchanged, or pass by for the day. Every one of these outcomes produces a different law. The stakes are not abstract — these nine bills will determine whether Virginia ends up with Spanberger’s version of an assault weapons ban or the House’s, whether loaded semi-auto carry on public property becomes a felony, and whether every law enforcement agency in the state is legally required to build permanent gun buyback infrastructure.

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This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.

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How reconvened session works

The Virginia General Assembly’s reconvened session, sometimes called “veto session,” happens every year in April. It’s the mechanism by which the legislature responds to a governor’s action on bills from the regular session. When Spanberger signed the first nine of her 18-bill gun package and returned the remaining nine with recommended amendments, she triggered this process for the contested bills.

The House has three options for each bill. It can concur, meaning it accepts the governor’s amendments and the amended version becomes law. It can disagree, which returns the original House-passed version to the governor’s desk — where Spanberger can then sign the original, veto it, or let it become law without her signature after 30 days. Or a member can move to “pass by for the day,” a procedural action that functionally rejects the governor’s amendments without a formal vote. Passing by or disagreeing have the same practical effect: the original bill goes back to Spanberger.

The nine bills already signed into law include the ghost gun ban (HB40, no grandfather clause), the firearm industry civil liability expansion (HB21), and the campus carry prohibition (HB626). Those are done. The nine in play Tuesday cover the assault weapons definition, the public carry prohibition, the under-21 purchase and licensing scheme, the mandatory buyback infrastructure, and several others. I’m going to go through each one and explain what Spanberger actually changed, because the answer is more complicated than most coverage suggests.

The assault weapons ban: HB749 / SB749

This gets all the coverage, and I actually rank it around third or fourth on the damage scale. The original House version banned semi-automatic centerfire rifles with a detachable magazine and any one of a list of features: pistol grip, threaded barrel, folding or collapsible stock, second handgrip, or grenade/flare launcher. It applied the same logic to pistols (two features required) and to semi-automatic shotguns (one feature). Revolving-cylinder shotguns were banned by design. Current owners before July 1, 2026 are grandfathered in on possession.

Spanberger’s amendment rewrites the definition in a way that massively expands coverage. The change: she removed the word “fixed” from the magazine language. The original bill only caught rifles with fixed magazines over 10 rounds. Her version catches any semi-automatic centerfire rifle or pistol that can accept a detachable magazine over 15 rounds — meaning the magazine capacity alone, without any additional features, now triggers the ban. A standard Glock 17 with a 17-round magazine, no banned features whatsoever, potentially falls under her definition. That is not a narrow assault weapons ban. That is a ban on most standard pistols sold in America today.

The Senate Majority Leader made noises before the session suggesting he wasn’t happy with some of her changes and was considering recommending the chamber disagree. If that happens, the original version — which is also terrible, but meaningfully less expansive — would go back to Spanberger. She could sign it, veto it, or let it lapse. Given that she sent these amendments specifically to soften her political exposure before the redistricting referendum, a veto after the House rejects her changes seems unlikely. More probable: the original version becomes law either way.

I want to be clear-eyed about what this means. Either version of this law is an unconstitutional ban on commonly owned firearms used for lawful purposes by millions of Americans. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen (2022) requires the government to identify a historical analog from the founding era for any firearms regulation. There is no founding-era analog for a categorical ban on semiautomatic rifles and pistols. These laws will face legal challenge. But they will be in effect for years while that challenge works through the courts, and in Virginia that means years of criminal liability for people who own perfectly legal firearms today.

The semi-automatic carry ban: HB1524

This one is, in my view, worse than the purchase ban — and it almost completely flew under the radar. The original House version created a statewide ban on carrying or transporting any firearm meeting the “assault firearm” definition on any public street, road, alley, sidewalk, public right-of-way, park, or any place open to the public. The wording covered unloaded, cased firearms. If you owned a grandfathered rifle and wanted to transport it from your home to a storage facility, you would be committing a crime.

Spanberger’s amendment introduces a real improvement: she added the word “loaded,” limiting the prohibition to loaded carry. If her version prevails, you can at least transport a grandfathered rifle in an unloaded, secured condition. The statewide scope remains, the CHP exemption is eliminated (meaning permit holders get no carveout), but the transport language is meaningfully better.

This is one of the genuinely weird dynamics of this session: in some cases, Spanberger’s amendments actually help gun owners, while in others — like the purchase ban definition — they make things dramatically worse. The reason, I think, has nothing to do with moderation. The redistricting referendum is on April 21, one day before the reconvened session. These amendments are calibrated to reduce the political cost of the gun bills among soft opponents before the vote. They’re not principled. They’re tactical.

The under-21 purchase ban and purchaser licensing: HB217

The original bill prohibited anyone under 21 from purchasing a firearm and established a quasi-registry through a purchaser licensing system. Spanberger’s amendment removes the licensing mechanism from what I can read of the bill, which is a real change. The under-21 purchase prohibition itself remains, and that is the core constitutional problem.

If you are 18, 19, or 20 years old in Virginia, you can be registered for the Selective Service, you can be called into military service, you can be handed a fully automatic M4 carbine and sent to fight. You cannot, under this law, walk into a gun store in your own state and buy a pistol to keep in your apartment. The federal age restriction for handgun purchases from dealers under 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) already creates a parallel problem at the federal level — one the Fifth Circuit flagged as likely unconstitutional after Bruen. Virginia is now doubling down on the same logic at the state level. It will get challenged. It should get challenged. But it will be the law in the meantime.

Firearm industry civil liability: HB21

This one was signed already, but its interaction with the reconvened session bills matters. HB21 creates the “reasonable controls” mandate: any member of the firearm industry operating in Virginia must implement controls to prevent straw purchases, theft, installation of auto sears, and other violations. Anyone — the attorney general, a local prosecutor, any private citizen — can sue for violations. The federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was specifically designed to prevent this kind of litigation. Spanberger’s legislature looked at PLCAA and said they don’t care.

The practical effect is that every FFL in Virginia is now a litigation target. Frivolous lawsuits don’t need to succeed to be effective. The legal fees alone can shut down a small gun shop. This is the explicit strategy: if you can’t ban the guns, bankrupt the people who sell them.

Mandatory buyback infrastructure: HB72

This is the long game bill, and I think it ends up being the most dangerous one in the package over time. It requires every law enforcement agency in Virginia — every county police department, city police department, and sheriff’s office — to establish and operate a permanent firearm surrender facility by January 1, 2028. Not a one-day buyback event. A permanent infrastructure, staffed, maintained, and available on an ongoing basis.

The buyback participation is voluntary. No one is being forced to surrender a gun. That’s the talking point. But the reason you build permanent, mandatory surrender infrastructure at every law enforcement agency in the state is because you intend, eventually, to make the surrender non-voluntary. You’re pre-positioning the logistics for a future confiscation program. Spanberger’s only amendment to this bill was a clarifying statement that the program exists to provide “Virginians who choose to safely return a firearm with a safe process.” She restated the obvious and changed nothing substantive.

The red flag expansion, storage mandate, and election-zone gun bans

Three other bills in the reconvened nine are worth naming. The red flag expansion goes from two classes of people who can petition for a firearm removal order — law enforcement and the attorney general — to 18 classes, including doctors of osteopathy, intimate partners, and former cohabitants. A breakup now potentially means an ex-partner can initiate a process to disarm you with no prior adversarial hearing. The constitutional due process problems here are severe.

The mandatory storage bill raises the penalty for keeping a firearm accessible in a home with minors from a $250 fine to up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Spanberger amended it — she added gun locks as an approved storage method alongside locked containers. That’s a minor positive. But the core mandate, that you must keep your home defense firearm inaccessible to children on pain of criminal prosecution, directly conflicts with the Heller ruling’s holding that handguns may be kept in the home in a ready state for self-defense.

The election-zone gun prohibition applies a 100-foot radius gun-free zone around ballot drop boxes. Drop boxes are placed on public streets, sometimes without much public notice of their exact location. You could legally be walking to work, carrying your firearm under a valid CHP, pass within 100 feet of a ballot drop box you didn’t know was there, and be committing a class one misdemeanor with up to 12 months in jail. Spanberger amended the polling place prohibition to limit it to times when the building is actually being used for elections, which is a meaningful improvement. The drop box radius, from what I can tell, remains.

What to watch on April 22

The assault weapons ban definition is the most important call on Tuesday. If the House passes by or disagrees on HB749/SB749, the original version goes back to Spanberger. Watch whether she signs the original, lets it lapse, or vetoes it. If she vetoes the original after rejecting her own amendments, the political math gets interesting — she’d own a veto of a bill her own party passed. I think she signs the original rather than veto it.

The carry ban (HB1524/SB727) is the second most important. If the House concurs with Spanberger’s “loaded only” amendment, the law is marginally better than the House version. If they pass by, the harsher original — covering even unloaded, cased transport — goes back to her desk.

The NRA-ILA is tracking all nine bills, and the VCDL’s legislative tracker at vcdl-lis.org is the best real-time resource for vote updates as they come in Tuesday. Watch both. This session moves fast and the outcomes have direct, immediate consequences for every gun owner in Virginia.

The deliberate complexity of 18 bills across one session isn’t a side effect of ambitious policymaking. It’s the strategy. When nothing can be properly focused on, everything slips through. That’s what April 22 is: the final accounting for a legislative blitz designed to make accountability impossible.