The bottom line
Governor Abigail Spanberger signed HB40 on April 10, 2026. Virginia is now the latest state to make a felon out of someone whose only crime is owning a gun they built themselves. There is no grandfather clause. If you have one of these guns, the clock is ticking and the courts are your only hope.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
What HB40 actually does
I want to be specific here, because the way this law is being covered in mainstream media doesn’t capture how bad it really is.
HB40, introduced by Delegate Marcus Simon, bans the manufacture, transfer, sale, and eventually the possession of unserialized firearms and unfinished frames or receivers. Most of the law takes effect January 1, 2027. The possession ban hits July 1, 2027. First offense is a misdemeanor (12 months in jail). Second offense is a Class 4 felony. That’s two to ten years in prison and up to a $100,000 fine. You will never legally own a firearm again.
And there is no grandfather clause. Zero. If you legally purchased an 80% lower before this bill passed, you have until July 1, 2027 to get it serialized through an FFL or become a felon. The state’s answer: go serialize it. The problem is that most FFLs have never done this before. Many don’t own engraving equipment. The “compliance path” Virginia is offering is largely fictional, and the people who wrote this bill know that.
The constitutional case
Professor Mark W. Smith, a constitutional attorney and member of the Supreme Court bar, was direct when I talked through it with him. HB40 is not constitutional under the plain text of the Second Amendment.
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The word “keep” means to possess. The word “bear” means to carry. You cannot keep and bear something you cannot first acquire, and that includes acquiring it by making it yourself. The right to acquire arms is implicit in the text, and the Supreme Court has said as much across multiple cases.
The historical record makes the constitutional problem even clearer. Under the framework established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the government has to show that a modern gun regulation is consistent with this country’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. There is no such tradition when it comes to banning private gunmaking. None. Americans built their own firearms from the colonial era through the early republic without any government interference. A 2025 Stanford Law Review note, “Gunmaking at the Founding,” documents this extensively. When the Second Amendment was ratified, there were no federally licensed gun manufacturers or dealers. The idea that you need government permission to manufacture a firearm for personal use would have been completely alien to the Founders.
The Supreme Court also settled in Bondi v. VanDerStok (March 2025) that the ATF’s existing federal ghost gun rule was consistent with the Gun Control Act of 1968. That was a statutory case about federal regulatory authority over commercial components, not a Second Amendment case about whether states can ban possession of privately made firearms outright. Virginia’s HB40 is a different animal. It’s a blanket prohibition on something that was legal and historically protected. That’s a much harder case for the state to win.
The Fourth Circuit is a disaster
Virginia falls under the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: the Fourth Circuit is one of the worst circuits in the country on Second Amendment rights. Getting real relief there means either getting lucky at the district court level or taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
The realistic path to protection is a preliminary injunction before July 1, 2027. That means a legal challenge needs to be filed fast, survive the Fourth Circuit, and reach the Supreme Court before the possession ban kicks in. Duncan v. Bonta in California showed what this can look like. Judge Roger Benitez in the Southern District of California entered an injunction against the California magazine ban, and there was a brief window where hundreds of thousands of magazines were lawfully purchased before enforcement resumed. You want to win before the law starts putting people in jail.
There is one meaningful factor working in our favor here. The Trump DOJ is paying attention. Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has already sent a warning letter to Spanberger, Attorney General Jay Jones, and Governor’s Counsel Matt McGuire about SB749 (Virginia’s companion assault weapons ban), stating that the federal government will sue if that bill becomes law. If the DOJ decides to bring HB40 into the same litigation push and Solicitor General John Sauer formally asks the Supreme Court to get involved, the Court almost always takes the case. That’s not a guarantee, but it’s a real lever.
The companion assault weapons ban nobody is talking about
While everyone is focused on SB749 (the assault weapons ban that would prohibit the sale and transfer of semiautomatic centerfire rifles and pistols capable of accepting magazines over 15 rounds after July 1, 2026), HB40 is getting less attention than it deserves. And in some ways, HB40 is more dangerous.
With an assault weapons ban, you can at least move your rifle out of state, sell it before the effective date, or hope the courts enjoin it. With HB40, if the courts don’t act, anyone who built a pistol in their garage under existing law is stuck. There’s no way to sell it. There’s no way to transfer it. You can’t even legally own it. The state is retroactively criminalizing something that was completely legal for the entire history of this country. SB749 is wrong. HB40 is something worse. It turns existing property into a felony with no exit.
Virginia is gone, and here’s why
It’s strange to say this, but Virginia is now in the same category as New York or California. A few years ago, the Virginia Citizens Defense League was one of the strongest gun rights organizations in the country, and pro-gun legislation moved through Richmond. Now Virginia has an assault weapons ban waiting for a signature and a ghost gun law that makes felons out of hobbyists.
One election cycle did this. That’s the lesson here.
Virginia today has over 1.2 million foreign-born residents. Senator Saddam Azlan Salim, born in Bangladesh, was one of the primary drivers behind the assault weapons ban. This is what unchecked immigration does to Second Amendment politics. It doesn’t just shift who wins elections. It changes what gets written into law, because you’re importing a population with no connection to American constitutional history, no real attachment to the founding, and no sense of why an armed citizenry matters.
I didn’t used to make this argument. I heard it and thought, okay, that’s a different issue. Then I watched what happened to Virginia, and the connection became impossible to ignore. You cannot preserve the Second Amendment in a country that is being continuously reshaped by people who have no reason to value it. Immigration is the longest-term threat to gun rights in America, and it gets almost no attention in this movement.
What to do right now if you’re in Virginia
If you have an unserialized firearm in Virginia, get legal advice before July 1, 2027. Do not try to test this law. I know how infuriating it is to comply with something this unconstitutional, but these jurisdictions are not neutral actors. They are actively looking for people in our community to make examples of. They will prosecute a law-abiding gun owner for a nonviolent regulatory offense while letting actual violent criminals walk. We saw this with Daniel Penny in New York City. A Marine veteran who stopped a genuine threat got prosecuted, while the system that let that threat roam freely faced no accountability.
If you get caught in this machinery, you lose your guns forever. Not temporarily. Forever. Comply while the litigation plays out.
Follow the VCDL. Follow Gun Owners of America. These organizations are already mobilizing legal challenges to Virginia’s 2026 gun package, and they need support. The legal fight here is winnable if it reaches the right court, and I’m confident about that. Under Bruen and the historical record, HB40 loses. The question is whether we can get it in front of judges who will actually apply the Constitution.
July 1, 2027 is closer than it looks.
Get the Weekly Briefing
New analysis delivered every week. Court decisions, case updates, and expert commentary.