Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanbergers newly signed ban on so?called assault weapons in Virginia has been in effect only hours and is already under coordinated legal attack from multiple gun-rights organizations and the Trump administration.
According to the Daily Caller, Spanberger signed SB 749 into law on Thursday after the General Assembly rejected her proposed amendments, insisting the measure would protect families, even as critics warned it would criminalize ordinary gun ownership rather than violent crime. The National Rifle Association (NRA) quickly announced both federal and state lawsuits in a post on X and a press release, with the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) filing their own challenges the same day.
The Trump administration has also moved to confront the law in court, with Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announcing late Thursday that the administration plans to sue over the ban. The move signals that the fight over Virginias new statute will not be confined to state courts but will likely become a major test of how far blue-state politicians can go in restricting firearms before running afoul of the Supreme Courts recent Second Amendment rulings.
As promised, we are taking Abigail Spanberger to court. Throughout the legislative session, the NRA and our members fought Richmonds radical gun control package tooth and nail, NRA-ILA Executive Director John Commerford said in a statement. We made it clear that this extreme anti-gun proposal, which bans the new purchase of commonly owned firearms and standard capacity magazines in the Commonwealth, is a blatant violation of Second Amendment rights and an affront to landmark Supreme Court cases.
Instead of listening to these factual concerns from their constituents, progressive politicians sided with Michael Bloomberg and his gun-grabbing groups, Commerford continued. The NRA will not sit idly by while progressive politicians strip the rights of law-abiding citizens, and our world-class legal team is locked, loaded, and ready to shoot down this outrageous gun-control law.
The Firearms Policy Coalition announced its lawsuit Thursday night on X, filing on behalf of two Virginia members directly affected by the statute. Their complaint takes aim not only at the substance of the ban but also at the political rhetoric that created the assault weapon label in the first place.
The banned semiautomatic firearms, including AR-style rifles, other similar semiautomatic rifles, and semiautomatic pistols and shotguns, like all other semiautomatic firearms, fire only one round for each pull of the trigger, FPC said. They are not machine guns.
Beyond the prohibition on so?called assault weapons, SB 749 also criminalizes possession of standard-capacity magazines above an arbitrary 15?round threshold, a limit gun-rights advocates argue has no grounding in public-safety data or constitutional text. Assault weapons is a euphemism that gun-control advocates use to gain support for banning certain semi-automatic firearms with features that provide a cosmetic similarity to firearms capable of fully-automatic operation.
Last night, Virginia joined a minority of states thumbing their nose at the Constitution and the Second Amendment rights of its residents by enacting a ban on assault weapons and restricting magazine capacities to no more than 15 rounds, SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut said in a statement. SAF will relentlessly pursue this issue until the Supreme Court finally addresses the constitutionality of these bans that have adversely affected millions of Americans for years, and now, our friends in Virginia. It is time the end-run around the constitutional protections of the Second Amendment that legislatures have been using come to an abrupt end.
These bans are an afront to the Constitution and an insult to the intelligence of Virginians who were fed lies and misrepresentations by their elected officials, SAF founder Alan Gottlieb also said. Were excited to fast track this case to the Supreme Court.
The legal offensive in Virginia comes as the Department of Justice has already taken aim at similar restrictions in the Mountain West, having sued the city of Denver over its assault weapons ban on May 5 and filed litigation to overturn Colorados magazine-capacity limit on May 6. With multiple conservative legal powerhouses now converging on Spanbergers law, the courts will be forced to decide whether progressive lawmakers can continue to thumb their nose at the Constitution, as Kraut put it, or whether the Supreme Courts recent proSecond Amendment precedents will finally halt the spread of these bans nationwide.
Login