By Bob Gibson
Daily Progress political blogger
Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Manassas, plans to push again Monday for something that fellow Republicans in the House of Delegates just aren’t ready to buy.
Marshall is still pushing a bill to change state concealed-carry bans at universities to show that “potential killers need to know that Virginia’s colleges and universities are not ‘gun free zones’ where no one will be able to stop them from killing as many people as they can.”
Marshall has had a few bad days on the House floor trying to attach his “let college professors and administrators carry a gun” amendment to various bills, only to get shot down time after time by fellow Republicans.
“We are burying students and they are burying legislation,” Marshall said of fellow delegates who kept a couple of Senate bills from coming up for House floor debate last week so that he would not be able to attach his amendment to them.
Twice, fellow Republicans stopped Marshall from attaching his measure to bills through procedural moves, apparently not wanting to take recorded House floor votes on what the Manassas conservative calls his Concealed Carry on Campus legislation.
“A professor or an administrator can have a concealed carry permit” and could safely protect students on a campus, Marshall said. “Even in urban areas, they’d rather have some armed professor try to protect their son or daughter from some lunatic,” he insisted.
That is the kind of debate that a large collection of National Rifle Association A-rated delegates might prefer not to have on the House floor, so Republicans are merely protecting their own by frustrating Marshall’s bid to put a concealed-carry measure up for debate there.
Marshall’s bill to accomplish the same end was left for dead in a House committee without a recorded vote. His House Bill 424 would have allowed “full-time faculty members of state institutions of higher education who possess a valid Virginia concealed handgun permit to carry a concealed handgun on campus.”
Marshall, given the same treatment that the GOP majority gives bills of minority Democrats that Republicans wish to quietly kill, is not one to give up.
On Monday, he plans to hold a 10:30 a.m. news conference to showcase his dead bill and once again.
So far little news has stemmed from the hard-nosed legislative combat that Marshall engages in with fellow Republicans with some relish.
Marshall is sharpening his message for a bid to overtake former Gov. Jim Gilmore for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination that Gilmore hopes to win May 31 at a Richmond statewide GOP convention.