Governor Abigail Spanberger signed new laws at ceremonies in Charlottesville on Tuesday, including one in the University of Virginia Rotunda just a few blocks away from the site of a 2022 triple murder. That legislation bans firearms on public college and university campuses, as WMRA’s Christine Kueter reports.
[sound of clapping]
Against the backdrop of a verdant, graduation-ready campus, and more than three years after a shooting at UVa that left three undergraduate student-athletes dead, Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a new law Tuesday that for the first time expands a ban on possessing firearms or explosives to public college and university campuses.
It took four tries to pass the new law, which Senator Creigh Deeds first introduced in 2022 after the UVa murders. Along the way, the bill earned support from Delegate Katrina Callsen, who joined Deeds, UVa president Scott Beardsley, and UVa Police Chief Timothy Longo, to mark its passage into law, which takes effect July 1, 2026.
UVa has long banned weapons from its dorms. But before the new law, Chief Longo explained, if a student was caught with a firearm on campus—
TIMOTHY LONGO: We’d institute an interim suspension, we’d issue a no trespass order, we’d escort them off grounds, perhaps we would seize their weapon. Once they were off grounds, they’d knock on the front door of the police station and say, ‘Give me my gun back.’ And there wouldn't be anything I could do. It wouldn’t be contraband, wouldn’t be evidence of a crime. And, so, what this does is it opens up the whole range of possibilities and tools that we have in our criminal justice system to enforce criminal law, to save lives and to prevent violence.
Senate Bill 272 (also known as House Bill 626) expands restrictions on possessing firearms while in public spaces owned or leased by the state, including, now, public universities and colleges, even if carriers possess a valid concealed carry permit.
The new law does not apply to law enforcement officers or security personnel, active military members, and those involved in cadet corps such as ROTC if they are participating in organized events.
In late 2025, Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. received five life sentences plus 23 years for murdering Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr., and D’Sean Perry, all UVa football players, on Nov. 13, 2022, after they’d traveled with a group of 22 students on a field trip to see a play. Jones opened fire on his fellow students, some of whom were sleeping, as the charter bus returned to campus.
Jones wasn’t immediately arrested. During the hunt for the shooter, the UVa community instituted a 12-hour lockdown, forcing students to hide in closets, barricaded classrooms, and darkened dorm rooms. Police eventually apprehended Jones the following morning in Henrico County.
Shortly after the 2022 shooting, Longo said in a press conference that Jones had been on the radar of the university’s threat assessment team for supposedly owning a firearm. Longo said even with the new law in place, it’s still critical for people to report when they detect something—or someone—that’s off.
LONGO: What 2022 did was it sounded the alarm in this community that violence can happen anywhere . . . I’ve often wondered, how many people on these grounds, maybe it was a friend, maybe it was a classmate, how many people knew that those guns existed in our dorm space? How many people knew that this individual had a weapon? . . . Somebody knew something, somebody saw something, yet somebody did nothing. And from that came tragedy.
Chandler, Davis, and Perry all earned posthumous degrees from UVa the month following their murders. Had they survived, Chandler would today be 23, Davis, 24, and Perry, 25. Jones, who pled guilty to all the charges, will be 27 this November.
Spanberger also signed a cache of 16 new laws focused on affordability, energy efficiency, and housing protections for Virginians—what her administration calls its “Affordable Virginia Agenda”—including protections for renters, outlawing higher healthcare premiums for tobacco users, new requirements for power companies to upgrade qualifying homes’ energy efficiency, and reducing barriers to renters’ use of small solar devices.
