We all know that gun control typically accomplishes very little that's good for society, and by "very little" I mean nothing at all.

Yet there's usually lofty rhetoric about what it will accomplish, that it would keep domestic abusers from getting guns or stop mass murders or anything they care to name. And, in theory, the bills might do that if everything worked perfectly. It never does, of course, but you can at least see where they're coming from.

A recent bill in Virginia died that has a lot of people upset, though. Shocking, I know, but let's look at what's being lamented for a second.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed an identical pair of bills last week, disappointing university police chiefs who say the legislation would have helped protect Virginia’s college campuses from gun violence.

They were among 30 bills the Republican governor vetoed on March 26, with his office saying each would have violated the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun owners.

State Sen. Creigh Deeds, the Charlottesville Democrat who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said the legislation was crafted in response to the 2022 University of Virginia shooting that left three student-athletes dead and two others injured.

Both bills — the House version was sponsored by Democratic Del. Katrina Callsen of Albemarle County — would have banned firearms from the commonwealth’s public colleges.

Hindsight is 20/20, Deeds said, but had the bills been in effect years ago, it may have prevented the 2022 tragedy.

“We’ll never know. But we have an obligation to fix the loopholes or the gaps that we see. And that’s what this legislation was all about,” Deeds told The Daily Progress.

That legislation would have made it a crime to have a gun at a public university in Virginia in virtually all cases, allowing law enforcement to make arrests, seize weapons and open criminal investigations.

There's just one problem with this.

You see, while the law does provide for campus carry, it sort of doesn't.

More than a year ago, when Deeds first started pushing this idea, I made note of one simple fact: They're already banned on campus because it's up to the universities themselves and none of them permit it.

The University of Virginia shooting wasn't the result of campus carry. It was the result of someone breaking the rules in the first place--and since UVA doesn't permit guns and the law requires that they do before someone carries one on campus, the alleged killer broke the law.

Period. 

You don't need a new law just because the old one didn't work. In fact, the law may well have prevented someone from being able to meet the threat and end it before anyone got hurt because no law-abiding citizen could be armed.

What Deeds is really bothered by is the fact that a college could allow guns on campus if they so desired. They could figure out that the presence of armed good guys is a good thing and change their minds.

This bill wouldn't have stopped the UVA shooting because guns were already prohibited, but why would an anti-gun lawmaker worry about silly things like facts, anyway?