The local TV host’s girlfriend was shot dead by a former colleague live on air but his victory in Virginia was about more than gun control, he tells Lois Beckett

It was the second high-profile shooting, not the first, that pushed Chris Hurst from his career as a local television journalist to his decision to run for office.



In 2015, Hurst’s girlfriend, journalist Alison Parker, was shot dead by a disturbed former colleague during a live television broadcast in Virginia. WDBJ7 cameraman Adam Ward was also killed.

More than a year later, Hurst was sent to cover another workplace shooting at a local rail car manufacturing company. A disgruntled former employee had burst into the facility and shot several workers, one fatally, before killing himself.

The similarities to Parker and Ward’s killings left Hurst shaken and convinced that he could not continue to work as a journalist. Instead, he decided to run for local office in Virginia against an NRA-backed Republican incumbent – and he won.

Hurst’s victory in his race for Virginia’s house of delegates this November has been a rallying point for gun violence prevention activists frustrated by years of political opposition to any new gun control laws in Congress and in state capitals.

It has also been a turning point in a new strategy for gun control advocates: instead of simply pushing for politicians to change their views on gun laws, often without success, they are running for office themselves.

From his earliest media interviews, Hurst, 30, made clear that he was not running as a single-issue candidate focused on gun violence prevention.

“We didn’t run on it. We did no paid communication on it, no things going into mailboxes, no TV commercials,” Hurst told the Guardian.

At the same time, Hurst’s personal experience of losing the woman he loved to gun violence was an indelible part of his campaign. “It was difficult for me to tell the story of why I’m running and not mention Alison and Adam,” he said. “But we didn’t make [gun violence prevention] an issue in our campaign because frankly we didn’t want the election to be a referendum on guns and Alison, we wanted it to be people really believing I could take my experience as a journalist and an evening news anchor and translate it into public service.”

Hurst said voters would sometimes ask him about guns, including one conservative voter who came to the door wearing a shirt that read “Gun control means using two hands”. He said he had a good conversation with that voter and his family, focusing on the “common values” in the gun debate, like preventing deaths from gun suicides and domestic violence.

The only way he had to respond to being labeled a “gun grabber”, he said, was to go out and talk directly to as many voters as possible.

In media interviews, Hurst did not hesitate to talk about his support for certain gun violence prevention policies, focusing on new, evidence-based proposals like a law to create extreme risk protection orders to temporarily remove guns from people at risk of hurting themselves and others.

He did not push for banning assault weapons, or embrace the all-out attack on the gun industry that Hillary Clinton had pursued in her Democratic campaign for president in 2016, a strategy shaped by Democrats’ approach to gun control going back in the 1990s.



The transition from well-known local television anchor to politician was not that difficult, Hurst said.

“What I loved about it, the vast majority of the campaign, was how similar it was to reporting,” Hurst said. “I knocked on doors for a living as a reporter, and oftentimes it was on people’s worst day or they had done something wrong or something had just happened to neighbors across the street, and here I was getting to knock on doors with a good news message to share.”

At an annual vigil for victims of American gun violence, held each December in Washington DC near the anniversary of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, Hurst was one of the keynote speakers. He paid tribute to Parker’s parents, and the family of Adam Ward, both there in the audience to hear him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Hurst talks about his girlfriend Alison Parker n 2015. Photograph: WDBJ-TV

Hurst had been enthusiastically greeted earlier that day by Connecticut congresswoman Elizabeth Esty, one of the leading gun violence prevention advocates in Congress. After his speech, he progressed slowly through crowds of people in St Mark’s Episcopal church who wanted to offer hugs and congratulations and thanks for his inspiration. “Wow!” people kept telling him.

Among those who greeted him was Tom Mauser, who has been a gun violence prevention advocate for nearly 20 years, since his son Daniel was killed at Columbine high school in Colorado in 1999, and a relative of Mary Sherlach, the school psychologist murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in 2012. “I walk in his shoes,” Mauser explained, pointing to his murdered son’s sneakers, which he still wears to symbolize his commitment.

In his speech that night, Hurst passed the campaign torch to Lucy McBath, another leading gun violence prevention advocate now running for the state legislature in Georgia. McBath lost her 17-year-old son Jordan Davis to a shooting when an older white man at a gas station accused Davis and his friends of playing their music too loud, and then took out a gun and shot him.

For other survivors of gun violence who choose to run for office in 2018 and beyond, Hurst’s advice was simple.

Chris Hurst, whose girlfriend died in live TV shooting, beats NRA candidate in Virginia Read more

“Trust in your strength,” he said. “The hardest days, longest days, most stressful days of the campaign, it became this fountain that you could just drink from all the time, of remembering why you were doing what you were doing. It always gave me enough energy to just keep on pressing. It redoubled my sense of urgency, that I just had no time to waste.”

People whose loved ones are lost to gun violence often describe themselves as members of a club that no one wants to join.

People in that club “all have that same inner fire and determination”, Hurst said. “Those who want to turn that in to running for office, I feel bad for their opponents.”