On November 4, Virginia elected its first woman governor, Democrat Abigail Spanberger.

It also got something else: another chance to pass comprehensive gun reform, something the majority-Democrat General Assembly had tried to do for the past two years, but was stymied by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.

Youngkin has vetoed 42 gun reform bills since he took office in 2022, including an assault weapons ban, a prohibition on abusive dating partners owning guns, and a minimum age for rifle purchases, according to a Trace analysis. He vetoed 24 of those bills in 2024 alone. The following year, Democrats reintroduced 15 of the same bills — plus three new ones — knowing they had little chance of passage. Now, with Spanberger set to be sworn in on January 17, Democrats are mobilizing for another try.

“We’re not going to take our foot off the gas,” State Senator Adam Ebbin, who chairs the Legislature’s gun violence prevention caucus, told The Trace. Ebbin plans to reintroduce the bills he sponsored that were vetoed by Youngkin last year. “I know that we’ll have others as well who are strategizing on it currently,” he said of his fellow Democratic lawmakers. “So there’ll be a substantial gun safety package reintroduced. And I expect the bills to be signed.”

“We have consistently voted for gun safety reform, and our voters prioritize it,” Ebbin added. “Governor-elect Spanberger is on the right side of those issues.”

Spanberger, who represented the Fredericksburg area in Congress until this year, has been a gun reform advocate since before she embarked on a career in politics. A former CIA operations officer, Spanberger joined a local chapter of the gun reform group Moms Demand Action shortly after she left the agency in 2014, according to a Washington Post profile. (Moms Demand Action is part of Everytown for Gun Safety, which provides financial grants to The Trace. You can find our donor transparency policy here, and our editorial independence policy here.)

Youngkin did sign a few gun safety bills this year, including a bill expanding the state’s tax credit for buying secure gun storage devices, legislation prohibiting people from threatening to discharge a firearm in certain public spaces, and a measure requiring school personnel to distribute guidance on safe gun storage when alerting parents that their children are at imminent risk of suicide. 

Delegate Dan Helmer, who sponsored six of the gun reform bills Youngkin vetoed, said the new laws marked progress, but fell short of what’s needed. “We should celebrate where we’re able to get bipartisan wins, and I think we have a mandate from the voters to aggressively pursue safety from gun violence in the wake of this election,” he said.

Helmer, who as the Virginia House Democrats Campaigns chair is an architect of the party’s November 4 victory, said lawmakers are working out their approach to reintroduce the vetoed bills in the next session, which begins in January. “We need to make sure that the legislation is effective, will work, and is implementable,” he said.

State Senator Saddam Azlan Salim said he and his colleagues will probably reintroduce the assault weapons ban and his bill raising the minimum age for purchasing semiautomatic rifles to 21. While Spanberger is expected to move the ball forward on gun reform, she won’t bring Virginia on par with New York and California, which have some of the strictest gun laws in the country, Salim said. “Governor-elect Spanberger is more of a moderate. She’s willing to work things in a bipartisan way.” 

Democratic lawmakers have been operating similarly under Youngkin, Salim said, seizing on common ground with Republicans wherever they can. Before reintroducing one of the vetoed bills, a minimum age requirement to buy assault weapons, Salim incorporated some of Youngkin’s criticism as communicated in his veto statement — and got a Republican to vote for it. “Where can we meet in the middle? That’s the headspace I think the governor-elect is going to be going into,” Salim said. “As much as we had a great night, Virginia is still a purple state.”

Gun reform had been gaining momentum under Youngkin’s predecessor, Democrat Ralph Northam, who signed several bills, including universal background checks on gun sales, limiting handgun purchases to one a month, and mandatory reporting of lost or stolen firearms. Northam left office in 2022 after one term because the state restricts governors to a single four-year stint.

This month’s election gave Virginia’s Democrats a governing trifecta. They already controlled the Senate but expanded their majority in the House of Delegates. Gun reform groups celebrated the win, having far outspent gun rights groups, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Everytown for Gun Safety, Giffords, and Brady spent more than $660,000, not including Everytown’s $1 million ad buy for Spanberger last month. Meanwhile, Second Amendment groups — including the National Rifle Association, National Shooting Sports Foundation, Gun Owners of America, and Virginia Citizens Defense League — spent about $81,000. 

Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said he plans on “fighting any infringement on our right to keep and bear arms in the Virginia General Assembly.” He cited several upcoming actions, including Lobby Day in January, when advocacy groups converge on the Capitol in Richmond to meet with lawmakers. “Last time we had this kind of threat to our rights, we had over 50,000 gun owners show up at the Capitol to peacefully protest,” he said, referring to a 2020 demonstration. (Authorities estimated the demonstration drew 22,000 people, according to NBC News.)

Van Cleave said he hopes to enlist more localities into the Second Amendment sanctuary movement, in which cities and towns vow not to enforce new state or federal gun restrictions. He also plans to fight gun laws in court. In October, a Virginia circuit court struck down the state’s 2020 universal background check law. The suit was brought by the Virginia Citizens Defense League and Gun Owners of America.

State Democrats consider the passage of universal background checks as one of their crowning gun safety achievements, and Helmer, the delegate, said he expects the court’s ruling to be appealed. Regardless, he isn’t letting the setback undermine his resolve to pass stronger gun laws. “I served our country in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “I have seen the impacts of gun violence and war zones. I don’t think our communities ought to be war zones.”