In the grim aftermath of the mass shooting in Virginia Beach in May, Gov. Ralph Northam insisted it was time for action. Thoughts and prayers were not enough, he said, as he called for a special session of the Virginia General Assembly to consider a raft of gun control proposals.

That special session began on Tuesday around noon.

An hour and a half later, it was over. The House and Senate voted along party lines to adjourn until November.

An array of proposals had been on the agenda, from universal background checks to limits on handgun purchases. Mr. Northam had insisted that bills be brought to the floor for votes rather than smothered in committees, as they often had been in the past. Many Democrats saw the session at least as a chance to force Republican legislators to put their votes on gun issues on the record, a potentially useful marker in a year when all legislative seats are up for election.

But this flyby session did not even produce that.

“It is shameful and disappointing that Republicans in the General Assembly refuse to do their jobs, and take immediate action to save lives,” Mr. Northam said in a statement. “I expected better of them. Virginians expect better of them.”

Few expected that a state legislature controlled by Republicans — albeit narrowly — would spend July shepherding a host of gun control bills into law.

Still, Mr. Northam had spoken from pulpits about the urgency of gun control legislation and on Tuesday had addressed a vigil near the Capitol, where groups on opposite sides of the question had gathered — armed with signs, stickers and guns — in anticipation of an impassioned debate.

In a news conference afterward, Kirk Cox, the Republican speaker of the House, called the session “just an election year stunt.”

On Tuesday, he and Thomas K. Norment Jr., the Republican Senate majority leader, sent an open letter asking the Virginia State Crime Commission, which studies and makes recommendations on criminal justice matters, to examine the shooting in Virginia Beach, in which 12 were killed at a municipal building, and to review any new legislation proposed.

They asked the commission to present a report on Nov. 12 — a week after the elections — after which the legislature would reconvene to consider what to do next.

Republican leaders compared this approach to the one taken by Tim Kaine, the former Democratic governor of Virginia and now a United States senator, who in 2007 convened a panel to study and make recommendations after the shootings at Virginia Tech, among the deadliest ever on a school campus.

But this was not just a partisan disagreement about process. Republicans said the proposals that were most effective need not touch guns.

“Democrats have exclusively focused on gun control bills during this special session,” Mr. Cox said at the news conference, adding that he fundamentally disagreed with that. “There is no focus on mental health or punishing criminals for the crimes they commit.”

Indeed, a surprising last-minute proposal by Mr. Norment, which would have banned guns from local government buildings, brought such an intense backlash from his fellow party members that he pulled it just after the short-lived session began.

Given this political reality, Democrats who were fuming over the developments on Tuesday had to admit that they had low expectations for the session, even if it had been allowed to proceed as planned.

While State Senator Dick Saslaw, a Democrat, called the abrupt adjournment “the most irresponsible act I’ve seen in all my years in the General Assembly,” he acknowledged that he thought “hardly anything” would have come out of the session anyway.

“I figured they’d pull something pretty much like that,” he said of the Republicans’ vote to adjourn. “But I thought it might come a little later in the afternoon.”

Source: Read Full Article