The office of Democratic Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones glossed over multiple Supreme Court decisions on the Second Amendment in a brief defending a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms.
Multiple pro-Second Amendment organizations filed suit after Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed SB 749, which banned so-called “assault weapons.” In the response to a suit filed by Gun Owners of America in Lancaster County Circuit Court, Jones’ office questioned why GOA’s complaint mentioned landmark United States Supreme Court decisions like Heller and Bruen, claiming that instead the Virginia Constitution’s provision was tied to militia service.
“The emphasized clause was added in 1971 and did not exist in any prior Constitution of Virginia. Rather than placing it in a free-standing section, the drafters embedded it inside the militia provision, joined to the militia clause by the conjunctive adverb ‘therefore,’” the Virginia Attorney General’s office claimed. “That structure tied the new clause to the language that preceded it, making the right-to-bear-arms clause a consequence of the militia clause, not a free-standing guarantee.”
Gun Owners of America Senior Vice President Erich Pratt scoffed at the reasoning from Jones’ office.
“Virginia is asking the court to do exactly what the Supreme Court rejected in Heller: pretend that a constitutional right with language nearly identical to the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right at all,” Pratt told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Their so-called ‘Virginia methodology’ is nothing more than judge-empowering interest balancing dressed up as legal theory.”
“These are unserious arguments that no court has adopted, and Virginians’ fundamental rights should not depend on uncreative attempts to relitigate settled constitutional law,” Pratt continued.
Jones’ office suffered a legal defeat on June 4 when a judge with the Lynchburg City Circuit Court reaffirmed a permanent injunction issued in October 2025 blocking the state’s “universal background check” law from taking effect on constitutional grounds.
In the 2008 Heller decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms. In 2010, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applied to the states under the provisions of the 14th Amendment, with its 2022 ruling in Bruen further clarifying the standards by which gun control laws were to be evaluated for constitutionality.
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