The bottom line
Virginia’s Senate passed an 11 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition, with proceeds directed to the Virginia Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention Fund. The bill is almost certainly unconstitutional. It will get challenged. It will likely get struck down. But while the legal fight plays out over years, the money flows, and at least some of it will flow directly to the same anti-gun organizations that lobbied to put the people who voted for this tax into office.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What the bill actually does
Virginia HB1094 and its Senate companion SB763, sponsored by Democratic Delegate Alonzo Lopez, impose an 11 percent excise tax on gross receipts from the sale and distribution of firearms and ammunition within the Commonwealth. The tax applies to manufacturers and distributors operating in Virginia, takes effect July 1, 2026, and exempts law enforcement agencies. All revenue flows into the Virginia Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention Fund, which distributes money to local government agencies, hospitals, and community-based nonprofit organizations for “evidence-informed gun violence intervention and prevention efforts.”
The Virginia Senate passed the excise tax on February 6, 2026. The NRA-ILA confirmed its advancement alongside the semi-automatic ban that is already moving through the legislature.
On its face, it looks like a modest public health measure. Eleven percent on a $1,000 rifle is $110. People who are going to buy guns are still going to buy guns. No one is being priced out of the market by this tax. So what is actually going on here?
The constitutional problem the sponsors are hoping you ignore
There is a 1983 Supreme Court case called Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, 460 U.S. 575. Minnesota imposed a use tax on the ink and paper consumed by publications beyond $100,000 per year. The tax hit a small number of large newspapers disproportionately. Justice O’Connor, writing for the majority, struck it down on First Amendment grounds. The core holding was that when a state singles out a constitutionally protected activity for targeted taxation, it raises serious concerns that the tax is designed to burden the exercise of that right, not to raise general revenue. The government cannot use the tax power to selectively penalize constitutionally protected conduct.
Now apply that reasoning to a targeted excise tax on firearms and ammunition. The Second Amendment is a constitutional right. District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) established that the individual right to keep and bear arms is fundamental. If you cannot selectively tax the press for being the press, the constitutional logic runs directly toward the conclusion that you cannot selectively tax gun purchases for being gun purchases. The Minneapolis Star case involved a one-step tax on the inputs to press activity. Virginia’s tax is even more direct: it taxes the protected activity itself, not just the raw materials.
The Bruen framework (2022) strengthens this position. Under Bruen, any regulation burdening Second Amendment rights must be rooted in the historical tradition of firearm regulation at the time of the founding. No analogous excise tax on firearms from the founding era has been identified. The Second Amendment Foundation is already litigating this exact issue in California, where Governor Newsom signed an identical 11 percent excise tax on firearms in 2023 in Jaymes v. Maduros. SAF’s position is straightforward: a tax on constitutionally protected conduct with no founding-era analog violates the Second Amendment under Bruen. That litigation is moving through the California courts right now, and Virginia’s bill is modeled on the same structure.
The bill’s sponsors know this. They passed it anyway. I’ll get to why in a moment.
The fund and who receives the money
The Virginia Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention Fund already existed before this bill. It was created during the 2022 special session. What HB1094/SB763 does is create a dedicated, ongoing revenue stream flowing into that fund from a tax specifically levied on gun owners.
The eligible recipients under the fund include local government agencies, hospitals, and community-based nonprofit organizations. “Community-based nonprofit organizations” is doing a lot of work in that list. Street outreach, hospital-based violence intervention, and violence prevention programs are all listed as permitted uses.
Now think about which organizations in Virginia operate in the gun violence prevention nonprofit space. Everytown for Gun Safety has Virginia operations. The Giffords Law Center has Virginia operations. Both organizations lobby heavily for exactly the kind of legislation Virginia just passed, including the AR-15 ban, the magazine ban, and the excise tax itself. Neither organization is explicitly named in the bill. Neither needs to be.
The fund gives the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services discretion over which “community-based nonprofit organizations” receive grants. The selection criteria are broad. An organization that does street outreach while also employing lobbyists who push for gun control legislation could qualify. An organization funded in part by Michael Bloomberg’s giving network could qualify. The bill does not prohibit anti-gun advocacy organizations from receiving this money. It is structured precisely broadly enough to allow it.
I want to be direct about what I think is happening here. Anti-gun organizations spent money to elect the legislators and the governor who are now passing this tax. The tax creates a fund controlled by the administration those same organizations helped elect. That administration distributes the fund to nonprofit organizations working in the gun violence prevention space, which is also where anti-gun advocacy organizations operate. That is a loop. Gun owners are being taxed to generate funds that will flow, at least in part, to the organizations that lobbied to impose the tax on them. If that is not the intent, the bill could have restricted eligible recipients to hospitals and government agencies only. It did not.
Why 11 percent and not 200 percent
This is the part that I think gets overlooked. Virginia’s Democrats have shown they are willing to go further than almost any other state legislature on guns. They passed an AR-15 ban. They passed a magazine ban with no grandfather clause. They imposed a $500 tax on suppressors. So why is this excise tax set at 11 percent rather than 50 or 100 percent? If you want to burden gun ownership, 11 percent is not much of a burden.
The answer is litigation strategy. An 11 percent tax on an ordinary consumer transaction is harder to characterize as a prohibitory burden than a 200 percent tax. Courts applying constitutional scrutiny ask whether a regulation substantially burdens the exercise of a right. An 11 percent price increase on a legal purchase looks superficially like an ordinary sales tax. It is not ordinary, because it is targeted at a constitutional right and the revenue is routed to advocacy, but the surface-level numbers make the argument harder for a court to dismiss out of hand at the preliminary injunction stage.
California’s 11 percent tax on guns is currently generating roughly $70 million per year in revenue. Virginia’s market is smaller, but the money is not trivial. The strategy is to keep the tax low enough to survive the initial legal challenges for long enough to build up a funded ecosystem of anti-gun nonprofits, then keep that ecosystem running while the constitutional challenge works through the courts over years. By the time a court strikes it down, the money has already moved.
The asymmetry that drives me insane
Here is what genuinely frustrates me about where we are in the Second Amendment fight. The anti-gun side plays this game at a level of strategic aggression that the pro-gun side almost never matches. They know this tax is unconstitutional. We know this tax is unconstitutional. They know that we know. They passed it anyway.
They are willing to pass something they know will eventually be struck down because the years between enactment and invalidation are useful to them. The money flows. The infrastructure gets built. The organizations get funded. When the courts finally say no, they look at the next vehicle. Meanwhile, we file a lawsuit, we wait three to five years for the litigation cycle to run, we win, and then they introduce the next bill in the next session.
We are always on defense. Every challenge we win is a challenge we had to fight for years while the law was in effect and burdening our rights. We never go on offense in any way that creates a comparable strategic problem for them. A state like Texas or Florida could create legal frameworks that expand Second Amendment freedoms in ways that force gun control advocates to spend resources fighting them in court for years. We could be running the same long-game legal strategy that they run against us, generating favorable precedents in friendly circuits, building case law that they then have to spend years trying to undo. We do not do that anywhere near consistently enough.
Part of that is because we actually believe in constitutional law. We believe in following the process, filing in the right courts, making the right arguments, winning the right way. That is genuinely admirable. It is also a structural disadvantage when your opponents are willing to pass laws they know are invalid just to run out the clock and fund their infrastructure.
Where this goes from here
The excise tax will be challenged. The Second Amendment Foundation is already litigating the identical California tax. Virginia gun rights organizations will file in federal court. The Fourth Circuit is not a friendly venue, as anyone following the Bianchi v. Brown Maryland assault weapons ban case already knows. That court upheld Maryland’s ban in 2024. A challenge to Virginia’s gun tax would land in the same circuit with the same judges.
The Supreme Court declined to hear the Bianchi appeal. Three justices, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, dissented from that cert denial, which signals genuine interest in taking up a Second Amendment case. But “genuine interest” is not a grant of certiorari, and a cert denial in one case does not stop lower courts from ruling in other cases.
The realistic timeline for a definitive ruling on targeted firearms taxes is several years out. In the meantime, July 1, 2026 arrives, the tax takes effect, and the money starts flowing into the Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention Fund. Every month the tax is in effect is a month that fund is receiving revenue and distributing it.
Virginia gun owners need to be clear about what they are fighting. This is not a public safety measure that happens to inconvenience them. It is a mechanism to take money from people who exercise a constitutional right and route it to the organizations working to eliminate that right. The 11 percent is almost beside the point. The structure is the problem.
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