Virginia Governor Ralph Northam wants his state to pass gun control. Yet, the legislature refused to do so during the regular session.

Following the tragedy in Virginia Beach, Northam followed the old adage of “never let a crisis go to waste” and called for a special session to address gun control.

This week, he revealed his wish list of what he wants out of this session.

Northam is proposing universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, bump stocks and silencers. He also wants to reinstate Virginia’s one-handgun-a-month law, require lost and stolen firearms be reported to police within 24 hours and allow localities to enact firearm ordinances that are stricter than state law, such as regulating firearms in municipal buildings. He thinks the punishment for allowing a child access to loaded, unsecured firearms should be enhanced from a misdemeanor to a felony and the age of the children the law applies to should be raised from 14 to 18.

Northam is also interested in extreme risk protection orders, which allow a third party — in Virginia, officials said this would be a police officer or prosecutor — to petition a judge for a warrant to seize legally owned guns if someone is determined to be an immediate threat to themselves or others.

A proposal Northam hadn’t mentioned until Wednesday is to prohibit those subject to final protective orders from possessing firearms. Currently, Virginia law prohibits people subject to final protective orders for family abuse from possessing firearms.

Of course, Northam may be waiting for a long time.

You see, Republicans hold both chambers of the legislature, making it unlikely that many of these measures will see the light of day. It’s possible they’ll be able to pass some kind of red flag law, but that’s likely to be the end of it.

However, it’s also important to note precisely how many of these proposed measures would have prevented what happened in Virginia Beach. None of them. Even Northam knows that.

So, what’s the deal?

Easy. Like most anti-gun lawmakers, Northam is more than happy to use the bodies of the slain as a soapbox from which to pontificate upon the removal of our Second Amendment rights. He doesn’t actually care about those who were killed. It’s not about them. It’s about pushing for the restriction of a Constitutional right, and he’ll grab any opportunity to do that.

That kind of crass opportunism is generally reviled by the public, yet with the help of a complicit media, people like Northam get a pass since they’re pushing the correct narrative.

Were he pushing anything else, he might have gotten pushback, but since he wants gun control, he gets a pass from the media that are, in theory, supposed to serve as a check on government.

Luckily for the people of Virginia, the governor can’t actually force any of this. He has to go through a legislature that isn’t likely to pass much, if any, of it. Not that he won’t spend taxpayer money to try and make it happen anyway, despite his knowledge that it wouldn’t have stopped the shooting in Virginia Beach.