Yes we know that carrying outside your vehicle is a no-no but were discussing whether a person could leave it "loaded" in a secure compartment of their car while on premises.
When I pick up my daughter, since I have a CHP I can be CC-ing while picking her up as long as I do not exit the vehicle. If I know I have to exit the vehicle, before the law change I had to unload and lock it up before arriving on school property. After the law change I thought, according to Philip, I was good simply placing it in the center console, loaded.
User, are you saying that doing so is unrecommended since the clear-as-mud-legalese can be used against us?
As ProShooter observed, that only applies to people who do NOT have a CHP. If you do have a CHP, then you have a blanket exemption from the federal statute, because you have a gun-related permit that requires a background check issued by the state in which you are a resident. Only Virginia law applies to people with a CHP as to the issues we're discussing here.
If you have a CHP, you can exit the vehicle, as long as the gun stays in the vehicle, and enclosed in a container of some kind, whether part of the car or not. Note that the car isn't allowed to go anywhere on school grounds - the statute allows you to drive on driveways, parking lots, and student-drop off areas, etc., but (in my opinion) you can't drive down onto the football field (for example) using the ambulance driveway. But you can park your car in a school parking lot, and get out and attend events in the school, leaving the gun "secured" in the car.
One other thing, for
non-CHP'ers: the federal statute
does permit you to bring your gun with you, as long as you unload it and put it in a locked container or locked firearms rack ("container" is not otherwise defined), before you get within a thousand feet of the school property.
(Sometimes, as a way of demonstrating how ridiculous that statute is, I've thought about organizing lots of gun-totin' folks to drive around a city, stopping their cars every time they enter or exit the thousand-foot, smack dab in the middle of traffic, get out and unload or reload, and box or unbox, as appropriate. That statute applies to every "school" other than college/postsecondary schools, private or public, and I think it includes things like Kindercare and Minnieland. You can't drive from one end of a city to another without going through "school zones"; I got the same question, once, from a guy who lived in a city in Virginia, in between two different schools; he couldn't legally go in or out of his own driveway without boxing the gun! Absurd. But as to my vision of a protest - "But officer, I'm not obstructing traffic, I am
required by federal law to stop my car and go through this time-consuming procedure! You'd have to arrest me for a felony if I did not do this. It's the federal statute that's obstructing traffic!")