Yesterday was the annual VCDL Lobby Day in Richmond, VA.
This is the annual event on MLK day where VCDL members descend on the offices of Virginia delegates and senators (all commonwealth offices, not federal). We send teams of 10 or so into each delegate and senator's office to discuss with the rep (or often with the rep's legislative aide) what the upcoming bills are for the next session and what the VCDL's position is on them.

Here's a shot of us waiting to get through the carry line. There are two entrances for this day: one for people not carrying (who go through the metal detectors) and another for those of us carrying. For some inexplicable reason the state police still wand everyone going through the carry line.



The orange stickers say "GUNS SAVE LIVES" which is the motto of VCDL (this comes in later). Note how we're all dressed... it was 20 degrees yesterday and wasn't going to crack freezing all day.


Full disclosure... these are my own pics from my phone and aren't going to be great. VCDL had photographers all over the place and will presumably be up on vcdl.org soon.

From there our team of 10 went up to the fourth floor to start hitting offices. Our team drew a bunch of Republicans and none of them was hostile to the agenda. They all agreed to look over the VCDL's notes - in previous years it has been a front-and-back single sheet. This year it was a whole packet. There are lots of bad bills in this year in VA.

However, there are some good bills - if you follow the previously mentioned PDF link you can see that the VERY FIRST ONE is a bill that will undo what Attorney General Mark Herring did recently, where he unilaterally decided to stop honoring CHP's from 25 states. Turns out... he actually has the authority to do this in Virginia. And you can see that VCDL has some delegates who are going to work pretty hard not only to undo the damage he did, but to make it impossible for another Atty Gen to do it in the future.

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