Virginia State Shooting Exposes the Failed Logic of Gun Control

On Saturday, August 15, 2026, at about 1:30 a.m. on the Virginia State University campus, a shooting broke out. Five people were wounded, one of them a 20-year-old student at the university. Camron Rarris, 19, was found hours later and was charged with four counts of malicious wounding. The Virginia State student was treated and released with non-life-threatening injuries. A 21-year-old man remains in critical condition, according to foxnews.com.

Police are seeking others to determine if some people fired back in defense of self and others. A 23-year-old man, a 17-year-old teenager, and a 19-year-old woman had non-life-threatening injuries. The crimes appear to have had little to do with the school, aside from its location.

Virginia State University is located about 25 miles south of Richmond and has close to six thousand students. The cause of the shooting is not yet known.

Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit with a mandate to reduce school violence, referenced the Virginia State incident and posted this on X:

Students should never have to fear gun violence in a place where they go to learn, grow, and build their futures.

Gun violence is an ever-growing public health epidemic that demands our attention now.#EndGunViolence #HonorWithAction https://t.co/Rqdy6EuBfT

— Sandy Hook Promise (@sandyhook) August 15, 2026

“Gun violence” is a political term designed to associate guns with social problems.

The term conflates suicides, murders, justified homicides, and firearm accidents as all part of the problem, and thus, defines the “problem” as “guns”. Suicides and homicides have different causes and solutions. The number of guns in a community is not correlated with the number of suicides or homicides. Fatal accidents with guns have been dropping for over a hundred years and are at an all-time low, in spite of firearms ownership being at an all-time high.

In 2025, and it appears likely in 2026, the murder rate in the USA was and will be at an all time low.

Unfortunately, Sandy Hook Promise is actively working to, “expand background checks on all firearm sales, pass temporary transfer orders, create secure storage laws, limit high-capacity magazines, and institute high-capacity magazine limits.”

There is little reason or evidence to believe these policies would actually reduce active school shootings.

There is no consideration of the costs of such policies or the reasons such policies are becoming more and more difficult to implement.  Instead the site promotes highly controversial statements such as:

Background checks rarely provide false-positive results. 

The FBI makes the claim, but John Lott presents plenty of evidence the claim is not correct, that a large number of false positives are created, and the false positive have large racial biases. There is little, if any evidence more background checks would reduce the murder rate or the number of active mass murders. A bill has passed the House, and is pending before the Senate, to force the FBI to share NICS demographic data with the Congress. Currently, the FBI refuses to do so.

Sandy Hook Promise promotes what they call “Temporary Transfer Orders”, which appear to be “red flag” laws designed to allow courts to take people’s guns without due process.

As the statement at Sandy Hook Promise claims these orders respect due process, it is difficult to see exactly what they are promoting. All states currently have processes to place people under care if a court has evidence they pose a threat to themselves or others. Those processes do not focus on firearms. They focus on the individuals and the potential threat they may pose. It is unclear exactly what Sandy Hook Promise is promoting with this policy.

Sandy Hook Promise also opposes some weapons modifications. Auto sears are already heavily regulated and almost impossible to legally obtain. “Switches” are a type of auto sear. Bump Stocks are almost never used in crime. Forced-reset triggers are almost never used in crime. The premise used to oppose these modifications is that more shots fired mean more innocents hurt. The example given is Sandy Hook. None of these devices were used at Sandy Hook. These devices make some incidents less dangerous by making the firearms hard to control and aim, thus reducing casualties.

Narrative Comes Before the Evidence

For gun-control organizations, nearly every shooting produces the same diagnosis. A criminal act becomes “gun violence.” The firearm becomes the disease. Restrictions on peaceable gun owners become the prescribed cure.

Sandy Hook Promise did not wait for the facts of the Virginia State University shooting. It immediately reached for the same political label and the same gun-control agenda.

Criminal violence should be answered by identifying and prosecuting the people responsible. It should not become a pretext for burdening Americans who committed no crime.

More fundamentally, the right to keep and bear arms is not contingent on Sandy Hook Promise’s policy preferences. The Second Amendment removed that right from ordinary political interest balancing. Advocacy organizations cannot manufacture government authority by relabeling a protected right as a public-health problem.

The failed logic remains the same: blame the gun, ignore the criminal, and demand restrictions on everyone else. Americans are increasingly unwilling to accept that answer.

About Dean Weingarten:

Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.