On June 4, 2026, a Lynchburg judge refused to let the Spanberger administration pretend a permanently enjoined law was back in force, denied AG Jay Jones's…
The bottom line
On June 4, 2026, a Lynchburg judge refused to let the Spanberger administration pretend a permanently enjoined law was back in force, denied AG Jay Jones’s motion to dissolve the injunction, and ordered the Virginia State Police to stop running private-sale background checks again. The emergency clause Governor Spanberger attached to HB 1525 was constitutionally void from the moment she signed it, and Judge F. Patrick Yeatts just made that official.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
How we got here
In October 2025, Yeatts issued a permanent injunction striking down Virginia Code section 18.2-308.2:5, the 2020 law requiring background checks on private firearm transfers. His reasoning was straightforward and hard to argue with: federal law prohibits licensed dealers from selling handguns to anyone under 21. Virginia’s private-sale background check requirement ran every transfer through that same NICS system. The result was that 18-to-20-year-old Virginians could legally possess handguns but had no lawful mechanism to acquire one at all. That is not a technicality. That is a complete, effective prohibition on a constitutional right for an entire class of adults.
The case was Wilson et al. v. Hanley, brought by Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation, and the Virginia Citizens Defense League. They filed it the same year the law passed. It took five years, but they won a permanent injunction. The fight should have ended there.
It did not.
The legislature’s workaround attempt
Rather than accept the court’s ruling, the Democrat-controlled General Assembly passed HB 1525 this spring. The bill formally raised the handgun purchase age to 21, effectively writing the age-based bar into state statute rather than leaving it as a byproduct of federal law. It also restored the private-sale background check requirement. The Spanberger administration’s theory was that by fixing the age problem on paper, the underlying constitutional defect that caused the injunction was cured, making the old case moot.
Spanberger signed HB 1525 on April 22, 2026, and she attached an emergency clause to make it effective immediately rather than waiting for the standard July 1 effective date.
The administration walked straight into a constitutional wall it should have seen coming.
Virginia’s constitution, Article IV Section 13, is explicit: an emergency clause only takes effect if the legislation passes by four-fifths of the members voting in each chamber, with the name and vote of every member recorded in the journal. Four-fifths. Eighty percent. That threshold exists precisely to prevent the majority from arbitrarily bypassing the public’s standard 90-day window to respond to new laws.
HB 1525 cleared the Senate 21-18 and the House 63-36. In the Senate, that is 53.8% of members voting. In the House, 63.6%. Both figures fall 15 to 25 points short of the required supermajority. The emergency clause was constitutionally void the moment it was enacted. Spanberger and Jones either did not know this, or they knew it and pressed forward anyway hoping no one would push back hard enough to matter.
The administration ordered the State Police to enforce a law that wasn’t in effect
On May 27, 2026, the Virginia State Police restarted private-sale background checks. AG Jones sent formal notice to VCDL and GOA that enforcement was resuming under HB 1525’s authority. The State Police, under Superintendent Col. Jeffrey S. Katz, complied with that direction.
What this means is simple. The Spanberger administration ordered state law enforcement to resume conducting background checks that a court had permanently enjoined, relying on a statutory authority that did not legally exist yet because the emergency clause was null and void. The permanent injunction from October 2025 was still in force. No court had dissolved it. No appellate ruling had reversed it. The administration simply decided the injunction no longer applied.
GOA, GOF, and VCDL responded on May 28 by filing a rule-to-show-cause motion naming Katz. If the state won’t comply with a permanent injunction voluntarily, contempt proceedings are the appropriate remedy. That is how courts enforce their orders.
What Yeatts decided on June 4
Yeatts denied Jones’s motion to dissolve the injunction. He ordered the Virginia State Police to once again halt private-sale background checks and comply with the October 2025 order. He appears to have accepted the plaintiffs’ argument that the emergency clause failed the 4/5 constitutional requirement, meaning HB 1525 simply was not in lawful effect when the State Police resumed enforcement.
On contempt, Yeatts declined to hold Katz personally in contempt at this stage. I think that was the right call, and I want to say so plainly. There was genuine legal ambiguity here, at least from the perspective of a law enforcement official receiving direction from the Attorney General. Katz received formal guidance from Jones’s office that the new statute authorized resumed enforcement. Whether that guidance was wrong as a matter of constitutional law is one thing; whether it was the kind of willful defiance that warrants contempt sanctions against a state police superintendent is another. Yeatts recognized that distinction. The warning he issued to the Attorney General’s office, though, is not ambiguous: keep defying this order and the contempt outcome changes.
The constitutional substance matters here
The under-21 problem is not a procedural loophole. It goes to the heart of what Bruen, Heller, and McDonald require.
Heller established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, most centrally for self-defense. McDonald incorporated that right against the states. Bruen added the analytical framework: if the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct, the government must justify its regulation by pointing to a historical tradition of analogous burdens at the founding. Generic interest-balancing is off the table.
There is no founding-era tradition of requiring government approval before one free citizen transfers a firearm to another. The NICS system was created in 1993, 200 years after the founding. The mandatory private-transfer check has no historical analog that survives Bruen scrutiny. And the Fifth Circuit’s January 2025 ruling in Reese v. ATF struck down the federal handgun purchase ban for 18-to-20-year-olds under exactly this framework. Judge Edith Jones found that the Militia Act of 1792 actually required 18-year-olds to enroll in the militia and furnish their own weapons. The founding generation expected this age group to be armed, not disarmed.
Reese is Fifth Circuit precedent, not binding on Virginia courts or the Fourth Circuit. But the doctrinal logic is directly applicable. Virginia’s HB 1525 raises the state purchase age to 21, targeting the same age group the Fifth Circuit said has a protected constitutional right. When that law actually takes effect on July 1, it is going to face a serious Bruen challenge, and the historical record the government will need to survive that challenge is thin.
What the administration’s conduct tells you
I have been watching Virginia Democrats push gun control through the legislature and defend it in court for years now, and the pattern here is familiar. When courts rule against their preferred policies, the response is not to reconsider whether the policy is constitutionally sound. The response is to find a different mechanism, attach an emergency clause, and hope the legal ambiguity lasts long enough to establish facts on the ground before anyone successfully challenges it.
That is what happened here. The permanent injunction was in place. The General Assembly passed a new bill. The governor signed it with an emergency clause that plainly failed the constitutional threshold. The Attorney General told the State Police to resume enforcement. And for about a week, from May 27 to June 4, Virginia ran background checks in defiance of a court order.
Yeatts’s ruling is worth more than just the immediate outcome. His comment that government officials do not get to ignore constitutional rights when they disagree with them is a direct rebuke to exactly this strategy. You cannot put a new number on an enjoined law and instruct state police to treat the injunction as dissolved. Courts do not work that way. The rule of law does not work that way.
Where this goes
HB 1525 will take effect on July 1 under normal statutory operation, assuming no further injunctive relief before then. The plaintiffs will almost certainly seek to enjoin that too, and given the Bruen framework, the under-21 purchase ban provision in particular is constitutionally vulnerable.
In the meantime, AG Jones now faces a clear warning from Yeatts. If he directs State Police to resume enforcement before July 1, or if the administration tries another workaround before the courts address the merits of HB 1525, contempt proceedings are coming for real. That is a political and legal problem the Spanberger administration created entirely for itself by refusing to accept an adverse court ruling.
Virginia gun owners owe GOA, GOF, and VCDL real credit for pushing this through litigation five years running and filing immediately when the administration defied the injunction. Permanent injunctions mean something. Courts mean something. And on June 4, one circuit court judge in Lynchburg reminded the Spanberger administration of both.
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