Boyfriend of reporter killed on live TV aims to unseat NRA-endorsed lawmaker

A year after his girlfriend was shot dead on live television, Chris Hurst found himself reporting on another brutal workplace shooting.

In August 2015, Alison Parker, a 24-year-old news reporter for WDBJ7 in Roanoke, Virginia, was killed during a routine morning segment, along with 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward. The gunman, a disturbed former colleague, later shot himself. About 40,000 people reportedly watched the journalists’ murder live – including their shocked colleagues. Parker had been quietly dating Hurst, another reporter at the station, and they had just moved in together.

Hurst kept working at WDBJ7 after her death, and in October 2016 he was sent to cover a very similar shooting – this time at a Roanoke rail car manufacturing company.

A disgruntled former employee had burst into the facility and shot several workers, one fatally, before killing himself. That attack did not become a national or international news story. It was just one of the daily drumbeat of shootings in America that leave more than 10,000 people dead each year. But for Hurst, who was sent to the scene, the similarities between the two shootings devastated him. It was the day he decided that he could not continue as a television reporter, he said.

Instead, he resigned from his television station this month and announced he is running for state office in Virginia against a Republican opponent who was endorsed by the National Rifle Association.

The young Democrat’s gun violence prevention platform is strikingly different than the sweeping indictment of guns and the gun industry that Hillary Clinton pursued in her failed presidential bid. Hurst said he is skeptical of some of the culture war policies that Clinton and other gun control advocates have embraced, such as bans on popular military-style “assault weapons”.

While he would not say outright that he opposes assault weapons bans, he did say that “it’s not anything that I’m going to be a proponent of – it’s not something that I would bring up”.

“I think it’s difficult to ban any type of weapon without real data to demonstrate it shouldn’t be in the hands of the common resident,” he said.

Instead, he’s more interested in policies that are narrowly targeted to keep guns out of the hands of people at moments when they are most at risk of violence. That’s the approach that researchers and mental health experts favor.

Rather than gun bans, Hurst is interested in changing state law to keep guns away from domestic abusers during the high-risk period directly after an emergency protective order has been granted, as well as creating a “gun violence restraining order” law, which would create a process for police or family members to ask a judge for a temporary confiscation of guns from someone who seems to be heading towards violence, whether to harm themselves or someone else.

“We have a lot of work to do to cut out the BS when it comes to gun violence prevention,” Hurst said.

“What I care about most is trying to reduce the number of people who die with a gun, whether it’s homicide or suicide. The last thing I would want to do is to try to change someone’s culture or their way of life.”

“A gun violence protection order – we could build a consensus around it. It would be effective. It would work.”

Hurst bristles at the suggestion that he might be running a campaign only focused on guns. He’s interested in rural education and supporting Virginia’s strong track record in bringing in refugees, and he’s proud of his work as a journalist.

“People have seen the investigations that I’ve done that have uncovered fraud by some of our public officials, have uncovered waste in the way that our government operates. I’ve reported on everything from heroin and opioid addictions to child abuse to mental health.”

He said he had already talked to members of Congress about his campaign but said it would not be appropriate to name names.

“Anyone who wants to call me a single-issue candidate can look at my body of work over several years. I didn’t report on a single issue, I reported on dozens of different issues.”

At the same time, he said, “I would not be who I am right now if the person I love was not killed with a gun.”

Parker and Hurst had started dating roughly nine months before she was murdered. They were earnest young journalists, by Hurst’s account, excited about the public service impact they could have, and eager to be useful to their communities.

In a few years, “she would have run circles around every one of these national news outlets who are now here to cover this tragedy”, Hurst told a CNN reporter in one of the segments about Parker’s death. “She had unflinching confidence in what she wanted to do.”

Hurst said that tragedy had toughened him for the political battles ahead. Like other family members of high-profile shooting victims, Hurst said he has been targeted by conspiracy theorists who claim that he is a “crisis actor” paid by the government, and that Parker is still alive, and that she got plastic surgery and now lives in Israel.

These claims continue to come to him through email and social media platforms. Sandy Hook families have faced similar attacks.

Hurst, who moved to a new city close to Roanoke to run for the house of delegates in Virginia’s 12th district, is already facing questions of carpetbagging. But he said the move, to a city that is still minutes away from his old home town, will allow him to stay connected to the Virginia community he knows while not being constantly reminded of Parker’s death – driving past the place where her shooter lived, as well as facing constant positive memories of their life together.

Hurst said he had idly discussed careers in politics with Parker. House of Cards was on Netflix, and it was easy to talk about. “We talked about it a few times: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I could be a senator’s wife?’ I told her I would much rather be a senator’s husband. She would have been awesome at it.”