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Hate crimes in Virginia spike 50 percent in a year

If a group wants to have a rally in a Virginia community, state law does not allow local leaders to stop people from carrying weapons. Virginia's legislature declined to change that law last year. Herring is pushing for it again.

MCLEAN, Va. -- Virginia has seen a whopping 50 percent spike in hate crimes in the past year. The national average is up 18 percent.

Virginia's top law enforcer wants the authority to stop hate groups before they make trouble like the one in Charlottesville last year.

Attorney General Mark Herring has proposed six bold hate crime bills.

"The threat is real and it is growing. And we all need to condemn it and make sure that law enforcement has the tools that they need to help prevent these acts from becoming violent," said Herring. He is introducing legislation that he says will protect Virginians from hate crimes and White Supremacist violence. Violence like what we saw in Charlottesville in August of 2017 that killed Heather Heyer.

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"People should not have a private militia that intimidates the community. These were private militias, answerable and accountable to no one, marching in formation with weapons of war, up the streets in Charlottesville, that should not happen in any community in Virginia," said Herring.

If a group wants to have a rally in a community in Virginia, state law does not allow local leaders to stop people from carrying weapons. Virginia's legislature declined to change that law last year. Herring is pushing for it again.

"When the community permits an event, where there's going to be large gathering, they would have the authority under state law in order to prohibit guns if they felt that was a way to keep the community safe," said Herring.

Herring is also proposing legislation to allow law enforcement to identify violent hate groups and to try to stop them. He wants a law that will keep guns away from people convicted of hate crimes, and he is pushing to expand the current definition of a hate crime to include protections for the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities.

RELATED: Pittsburgh synagogue shooting: What makes a crime a hate crime?

Currently, Virginia's Attorney General cannot prosecute hate crimes. Herring wants to change that.

"Hate crimes are designed to strike fear in a entire group is people, that cross jurisdictional boundaries. By empowering the Attorney General of the state to prosecute hate crimes, it says a really strong message to those vulnerable groups, I don't want the kind of hatred that we saw in Charlottesville, that we're seeing all over, take root here in Virginia and it's having a corrosive affect on many levels of our society."

To discuss his proposals, Attorney General Herring is holding roundtable discussions around the state. The first one is in Leesburg on November 2 and in Alexandria on December 3. Find more information here.

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