VA-ALERT: Legislative Alert! 2/28/14

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1. Legislative update - lifetime permit bill dead for this year, last two anti-liberty bills gasping for breath
2. AARGH! Ignore item #20 in last Update (2/28/14)

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1. Legislative update - lifetime permit bill dead for this year, last two anti-liberty bills gasping for breath
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VCDL has been working for over a week with Senator Carrico, Delegate Lingamfelter and his aide, Andrew Clark, the NRA, and the Virginia State Police to fix some issues with SB 608, Carrico's lifetime CHP bill. Stuart Higley, Carrico's aide, was exceptionally helpful in that endeavor - he was in the middle, coordinating with all the interested parties.

The changes that we managed to get into the bill switched VCDL's position from "oppose" to "support." Some important remaining issues kept our position from being "strongly support," however.

The bill was debated this morning in the Militia, Police, and Public Safety full committee. In the end, it was decided by the committee that the bill still needed more work and it was carried over until next year.

VCDL is fine with that decision, as it gives us a year to get all the kinks out of the bill the first time. We actually have several different avenues we could use to create lifetime permits, and we will be exploring all of them.

As an aside, Delegate Gilbert and Delegate Lingamfelter let the State Police know that they were not happy with positions the State Police have taken in the past against improving various aspects of Virginia's concealed handgun permit system. Lingamfelter encouraged the State Police to work with Delegate Gilbert to pass a bill in the future to recognize all out-of-state permits. A bill that did so (HB 705) was introduced by Gilbert this year, but the State Police spoke against it in the Senate just before it was killed.

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Delegate Carr's "celebratory gunfire" bill, HB 810, is in conference committee - as I predicted earlier this week, the House wants its version (a malicious wounding bill) and the Senate wants its version (a celebratory gunfire bill). There is no real place for a compromise, so I expect the conference committee will simply kill the bill. If Senator Marsh's version of the "celebratory gunfire" bill, SB 65, gets out of the House Appropriations committee (a big "if"), I would expect it to suffer the same fate has HB 810.

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With the exception of the veto session in April, the General Assembly will be through with this year's business next Saturday. We will then wait for the Governor to sign, not sign, or veto the bills that passed out of both the Senate and House. He has until the veto session to do so.


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2. AARGH! Ignore item #20 in last Update (2/28/14)
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Item #20 in the last update ("20. Looming scandal will be the #1 isse of 2016 Presidential Elections [VIDEO]") is actually an "infomercial" that was included in the update by mistake.

I'm trying to figure out how that item got into the update. I'm betting SPAM somehow got sent to the email address that I use to communicate with the editor, causing the confusion.

I apologize, I've never had anything like that happen before. Just ignore the infomercial in item #20.

Oh, well - at least it wasn't an ad for Moms Demand Action. ;-)

Thanks to member Charles Phillips for catching the mistake (and asking how much Stansberry & Associates slipped me under the table to include their informercial in the update). :-(






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