Gabe Cavallaro

gcavallaro@newsleader.com

STAUNTON — Whether you know it or not, selling or giving guns or knives to students of the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind is illegal in Staunton.

The law (9.05.170) first shows up in the Staunton City Code of 1938 and has remained unchanged since, but there’s no trace of it in the City Council minutes from that year or even dating back to 1930.

The code references a Virginia state law (§ 18.2-309), but that law forbids the sale of certain weapons to minors, and there is no state law that addresses the weapons rights of the deaf and blind community in the state.

As VSDB is a state institution, it does not fall under Staunton city schools policies, and so Mayor Carolyn Dull speculates that it may have been enacted to make it clear to citizens that there would be a penalty for selling weapons to a minor, she said.

But not all VSDB students are minors, as the school accepts students as old as 22.

That means if a 22-year-old deaf student were to walk into Nuckols Gun Works in Staunton, for example, under the city ordinance, it would technically be illegal for the shop to sell or give that student a gun.

This is a problem, Nuckols owner Chris Kincheloe said.

“How would you know they’re a student?” he said.

While the store conducts a presale background check and maintains the right to deny a sale to anyone, he doesn’t see any reason to reject someone on the basis of being deaf. Despite that, if a deaf person came into his store to buy a gun and was a VSDB student, under the current city code, it would be illegal to sell that person a weapon, whether the seller had knowledge that he or she was a student or not.

Now that doesn't mean the same goes for the legally blind interested in purchasing firearms from Nuckols, Kincheloe said, as those transactions would most likely be declined.

"We live on common sense here at the store," he said.

Meanwhile over at VSDB, there have been no incidents involving students and weapons since 2011 when Campus Chief of Police Charlie Coker started working, he said.

The ordinance hasn’t been referenced or applied in a very long time, Staunton Communications Manager Ruth Jones said, but after learning of its existence, Kincheloe said he plans to go to the City Council to try to get the law changed.

“This could be a problem for us,” he said. “We don’t want to get caught in some criminal violation for a 1938 ordinance.”

It is possible for city ordinances to be amended if they are deemed to be outdated.

In 2011, Staunton City Council amended an ordinance that had allowed for the “destruction or disposal” of a dog if convicted of setting foot on the property of any cemetery in the city. Now there’s just a fine for such a violation.

Whether the same should happen with the law forbidding the transfer of weapons to VSDB students, however, is not a conclusion he is willing to draw, said City Councilman James Harrington.

“I don’t think there’s any emergency about addressing it,” he said.

The city attorney would have to do more research on it to make sure there’s not a reason to keep it on the books that might be overlooked before he’d be willing to vote on amending the ordinance, Harrington said.