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By JOHN GOOLRICK
Rappahannock News Special Writer
The media have unsurprisingly made Governor Wilder’s one gun a month proposal the big enchilada story of the 1993 General Assembly session.
The story, after all, has all the elements of confrontation and suspense to attract mass interest. In a state that has become widely known as the gun capital of the East Coast, the Governor can be depicted as strolling down the streets of Dodge City for a shootout with such powerful special interests as the NR A.
And certainly the bill is an important one, though not one that will have a major effect on the lives of most ..Virginians even if it passes. I suspect that a majority of residents of our state never buy even one handgun in a lifetime much less one a month. So the measure would amount to little, if any, personal inconvenience for such people.
The truly big story up to this point in the new year broke last week when Wilder announced that the state will have a $53 million surplus in the current "fiscal year and promptly urged lawmakers to earmark it for transportation initiatives in Northern Virginia and salary increases for teachers.
Nobody was saying that the economic bad times that state has faced the past few years are completely over, but the fact of a surplus arising from increased tax collections certainly brought back fond memories of the past when such surpluses were routine. Indeed, lawmakers often counted on surplus funds to pay for some of their pet projects in the next biennium. ■ A return to a semblance of prosperity after a wrencing period of
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