The bottom line
On April 10, 2026, Governor Abigail Spanberger signed four gun bills into law. Two of them (HB40 and SB27) will turn law-abiding Virginians into felons for things they did legally, and drive the gun industry out of the state. I’ve read these bills. This is exactly what they do.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
Virginia is not California. Virginia is not New York. It’s a commonwealth with a deep tradition of individual liberty and gun ownership, home to Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and Patrick Henry. The founders who wrote the Second Amendment lived here. And a governor who swept into office on a wave of Northern Virginia transplant money is now dismantling what those men built.
Let me go through what she signed.
HB40: the ghost gun ban with no grandfather clause
Patroned by Delegate Marcus Simon and carried in the Senate by Senator Adam Ebbin, HB40 is being sold in the press as a “ghost gun ban.” That label is doing a lot of work to make it sound reasonable. So let me tell you what it actually does.
Part one covers so-called non-detectable firearms: any plastic firearm with less than 3.7 ounces of electromagnetically detectable material in the barrel, slide, cylinder, frame, or receiver, and any firearm that after removing all parts except a major component can’t be detected by airport or government building screening equipment. Immediate felony. First offense. No misdemeanor ramp. Class 5 felony, minimum a year in prison, up to 10 years.
Part two is the core ghost gun ban. This is the provision that hits tens of thousands of Virginians who have never done anything wrong. HB40 creates four criminal prohibitions making it nearly impossible to own, sell, buy, build, or transfer any firearm without a serial number issued by a licensed manufacturer. 80% lowers, Polymer80 kits, home-built CNC projects, anything 3D-printed, any frame or receiver that can be “readily completed.” All of it.
The law rolls out in two phases. Starting January 1, 2027, you can no longer sell, buy, transfer, or manufacture. Starting July 1, 2027, possession itself becomes criminal. The six-month gap is supposed to be a “compliance window,” but it’s a trap. You can take your unserialized firearm to a Federal Firearms Licensee to have it serialized. The problem is that serial numbers are typically imprinted at the manufacturer level, and most FFLs don’t have that equipment. And the industry liability bill Spanberger also signed is going to drive FFLs out of Virginia entirely. So where exactly do you get your firearm serialized when all the gun shops have closed?
If you can’t serialize, your options are: move the firearm out of Virginia, surrender it to law enforcement for destruction, or render it permanently inoperable. Or keep it and become a felon. That’s the choice they’re giving you.
The penalties are not minor. Second offense on the possession charge is a Class 4 felony: two to ten years in prison and up to a $100,000 fine. They’re treating peaceable gun owners the same way they treat people who commit manslaughter. And once you have a felony, your right to keep and bear arms is gone for life, everywhere in the United States.
What makes this worse than most gun bans, and I said this when the bills were moving through the legislature, is that there’s no grandfather clause. When California banned assault weapons, people who already owned them got to keep them. When the federal assault weapons ban passed in 1994, existing magazine capacity was grandfathered. Not here. If you built a rifle legally from an 80% lower in 2022, following every rule that existed at the time, Spanberger is now telling you that you’re a criminal. The law doesn’t care that you acted in good faith. You bought a gun legally. You built a firearm legally. Now you go to jail.
Americans have been building their own firearms since before this country existed. It’s how the Revolution was fought. Local gunsmiths made custom firearms without serial numbers through most of American history, right up until large-scale commercial manufacturing became standard in the mid-twentieth century. The founding fathers owned and used privately made firearms. Under HB40, Thomas Jefferson would be a felon.
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen established in 2022 that gun regulations must be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Justice Thomas wrote that the government bears the burden of proving a challenged law fits that history. There is no historical tradition of criminalizing unserialized privately made firearms. Mandatory serialization didn’t exist until the Gun Control Act of 1968. HB40 will be challenged in court and I think it loses under Bruen. But that litigation could take years, and people are going to be arrested while it works its way through the courts.
SB27: the industry liability bill
SB27, patroned by Senator Jeniffer Carroll Foy, gets almost no press coverage. It may do more long-term damage than HB40.
The bill requires every firearm industry member (defined broadly enough to cover anyone engaged in the “sale, manufacture, distribution, importation, or marketing of a firearm-related product”) to implement “reasonable controls.” These include preventing sales to straw purchasers and traffickers (already illegal under federal law), preventing theft from their business (you’re liable if someone breaks in and steals your inventory), preventing “auto sear installation” on products (also already federally illegal), and preventing marketing to anyone “at substantial risk of self-harm or unlawfully harming another.”
That last provision is the poison pill. How does a gun shop owner or a holster manufacturer know whether a customer or someone who sees their marketing is “at substantial risk”? They can’t know. The bill provides no safe harbor, no compliance certification, no clear standard. You don’t know you’re compliant until someone sues you and a jury decides you weren’t.
Who can sue? Not just the attorney general. Local prosecutors can bring civil actions. Any county, city, or town attorney can bring a civil action whenever it “appears” a violation occurred. Any private citizen anywhere in Virginia can sue your gun shop.
You send someone who presents as “at substantial risk” into a gun shop, have them receive marketing material or make a purchase, and the FFL faces civil liability. The litigation alone bankrupts a small business. Most gun shops are small family operations that can’t absorb the legal fees fighting off a manufactured lawsuit. So they close or leave Virginia. And when HB40’s July 2027 possession deadline hits and Virginians need an FFL to serialize their firearms, there won’t be one available.
That’s the trap. The ghost gun ban creates a compliance requirement that depends on FFLs being open. The industry liability bill is designed to close them. The compliance window is fake.
The other two bills
Spanberger also signed legislation expanding Virginia’s red flag process to broaden how guns can be removed from people served with protective orders. No conviction, no jury, no finding of dangerousness. A civil protective order strips your Second Amendment rights. This will affect fewer people than HB40, but it’s constitutionally rotten in a different way. The Supreme Court addressed gun confiscation without adjudication in United States v. Rahimi last year, and while that decision upheld the federal domestic violence disarmament law in a narrow context, it tied the ruling to situations where someone had been found dangerous. Virginia’s expanded mechanism pushes past that boundary.
The fourth bill closes what they call the “boyfriend loophole,” carried by Delegate Adele McClure as HB19 and Senator Russet Perry as SB160. It expands the domestic violence firearms prohibition to include anyone in a romantic relationship, without requiring marriage or cohabitation. Get into a physical altercation with someone you’ve dated and your guns are gone for three years under a mandatory prohibition. The definition of “intimate partner” covers anyone in a “romantic, dating, or sexual relationship” within the previous 12 months, broad enough that almost any ex-partner allegation can trigger disarmament.
What this is actually about
These bills will not stop criminals. A criminal who wants a ghost gun is not going to comply with HB40. Bryson DeChambeau just used a 3D-printed iron at the Masters. Making a functional firearm with a consumer-grade 3D printer has been possible for over a decade, and anyone willing to commit violent crime is not going to be deterred by a possession statute. These laws don’t disarm the dangerous. They disarm people who follow rules.
What Spanberger is building is a system of government knowledge and control over every firearm in the state. The ghost gun ban eliminates any firearm the government doesn’t have on record. The gun destruction pipeline under HB702 forces every law enforcement agency in Virginia to build permanent firearm surrender infrastructure. The industry liability bill eliminates private dealers who might operate outside that system.
Track every gun. Ban the ones that aren’t tracked. Make serialization impossible by eliminating the people who can do it. Then collect everything that’s left.
The NRA and the Virginia Citizens Defense League have both announced plans to sue. Under Bruen, there are real arguments against HB40’s retroactive possession ban, which has no historical analogue in American law. But litigation is slow, and people will be arrested and prosecuted before these cases reach a circuit court, let alone the Supreme Court.
Spanberger could have referred these bills to voters through the constitutional referendum process. She didn’t. She could have waited to see how legal challenges play out before signing laws that will land innocent people in prison. She didn’t. She signed them the day they hit her desk.
If you’re a Virginia gun owner with any unserialized firearm, talk to a lawyer now. Understand the deadlines. Understand what the penalties actually look like. That’s not me telling you what to do. It’s your life and your choice. But make it with full information.
This is what it looks like when a government decides your rights are inconvenient. No confiscation vans. Just statutes, phase-in dates, and liability traps that quietly turn lawful behavior into felonies. Virginia just did that to tens of thousands of people who never hurt anyone.
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