Let us start at the beginning:
Va. one of few states to allow domestic abusers to keep guns
Where/what/why are domestic abusers in other states not allowed to keep guns?
Wikipedia is as good a place as any to startt from:
The Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban often called "the Lautenberg Amendment" ("Gun Ban for Individuals Convicted of a Misdemeanor Crime of Domestic Violence", Pub.L. 104–208,[1] 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9)[2]) is an amendment to the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1997 enacted by the 104th United States Congress in 1996, which bans access to firearms by people convicted of crimes of domestic violence. The act is often referred to as "the Lautenberg Amendment"
Go search the Code of Virginia of 1950, As Amended. Find a law that prohibits "domestic violence".
I'll save you the time and trouble - there isn't one. "Domestic violence" is not a crime in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Go here (the new and improved site)
http://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode and search for the term "spousal abuse" [obviously without the quotation marks]. What do you get? Let me save you the time doping it yourself - you get nada. Zilch. Zip. Try it again with the search term "Domestic Violence". Any success with that? Nope!
So while we may "know" what the Lautenberg Amendment is talking about, the truth of the matter is that it just flat does not apply in Virginia. Another one of those cases where legal construction holds that the legislative body must have known what it was doing when it chose the words to describe what they were talking about or else they would have written something else.
I'm going to let you look up the bills the article discusses. Then think about stripping a person of an enumerated Constitution right for the conviction of a misdemeanor offense, and how even the Virginia General Assembly responded to that notion.
Screw
"Opposition to changing the law, she said, seems to stem in part from the General Assembly’s “sense that firearms are part of a basic human right,” even for those who have demonstrated violent tendencies toward family members.
That’s also the sense of groups that have opposed those bills.
If Lautenberg wanted to strip away rights "properly" and "correctly" he could have created a federal felony offense of "domestic violence" and let the federal courts get tied up in prosecuting those cases. Instead, he took a shortcut. A shortcut that his legislative GPS did not show did not exist in Virginia.
stay safe.