The Virginia Shooting Sports Association (VSSA) reports that a planned ‘compensated confiscation scheme,' or gun buy-back faces legal difficulties, so it will be ‘postponed'.
It appears the gun ban group sponsoring the “buy-back” did not get the required ordinance passed in Petersburg before the event.That ordinance is necessary thanks to a state law that VSSA helped pass in 2012. That law, HB22, states that no locality can participate in any program in which individuals are given a thing of value in exchange for surrendering a firearm to the locality unless the governing body of the locality has enacted an ordinance authorizing the participation of the locality.
For buy-back events such as this one, “firearms received through the exchange must be offered for sale by public auction or sealed bids to a person licensed as a dealer before otherwise disposing of the firearm.”