Fourteen prosecutors and counting: Virginia's assault weapons ban is losing its enforcers

The bottom line

At least 14 Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorneys have now announced they will not prosecute charges brought solely under SB 749. Every new refusal strips the law of the institutional legitimacy it needs to actually function, and when prosecutors a county over won’t charge, Virginians still have a lawful path to buy what Spanberger just banned.

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This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.

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How a groundswell forms

Watch the trajectory. When Spotsylvania County Commonwealth’s Attorney Ryan Mehaffey announced he would not prosecute SB 749, it was one prosecutor making a stand. Then it was three. Then around seven. Then by the first week of June 2026, the number had climbed to at least 14 Commonwealth’s Attorneys, plus around nine sheriffs who have said they will not enforce. Clarke County’s Sheriff Travis Sumption and Commonwealth’s Attorney Matthew Bass issued a joint statement: charges under the new statutes “will not be enforced in Clarke County against nonviolent offenders, where no other criminal conduct is alleged.” That kind of coordination matters.

Virginia has roughly 120 elected Commonwealth’s Attorneys, one for every county and independent city. Fourteen is about 12 percent. That number is not a majority, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Most of these are rural offices. Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria will enforce. But the trajectory is what matters here, and it’s moving in one direction. What started as a single Facebook post has become a public coordination network, and there’s no sign it stops at 14.

I wrote about the first wave of refusals and the mechanics of prosecutorial discretion when this story broke. The short version: a Commonwealth’s Attorney is an independently elected constitutional officer with near-absolute charging discretion under Virginia Code section 15.2-1627 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Wayte v. United States (1985). The governor cannot fire one for declining to prosecute. If the prosecutor won’t charge, the case dies. Spanberger can sign whatever she likes; she cannot compel a county-level constitutional officer to use state resources enforcing a law that officer believes is unconstitutional.

What this actually does to the ban

There’s a practical dimension to this that I don’t think gets enough attention. SB 749 is functionally a purchase ban. It criminalizes purchase, sale, transfer, and import of “assault firearms” and magazines over 15 rounds. Possession of items you already own before July 1, 2026, is grandfathered. So the enforcement risk is concentrated at the point of acquisition.

Because federal law generally requires handgun purchases to happen in your state of residence, that would normally mean Virginians can’t just hop to a gun store in West Virginia or Tennessee. But the non-enforcing patchwork is inside Virginia. If you live in Fairfax and want to buy something SB 749 prohibits, you could drive to Clarke County, conduct a lawful transaction at an FFL in a non-enforcing jurisdiction, and face essentially zero prosecution risk. The Commonwealth’s Attorney there has already told you he won’t bring charges. The sheriffs in these counties have said the same. That’s not a loophole in some abstract sense, it’s how a patchwork of non-enforcement materially limits how much this ban actually disarms people. Combined with the fact that Virginia gun sales in May 2026 ran 103 percent above the same month last year, a lot of Virginians seem to be drawing the obvious conclusion.

Taking apart Hashmi’s response

Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi called the refusals “a direct violation of their oath to uphold the laws of the Commonwealth.” AG Jay Jones pushed back earlier in the same week. Hashmi made three arguments: oath, precedent in other states, and SCOTUS cert denials. All three deserve a direct response.

On the oath: Hashmi has the constitutional order backwards. A prosecutor’s oath is to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Virginia, not to enforce any statute that happens to clear the General Assembly. Virginia’s Constitution, Article I, Section 13, explicitly protects the right to keep and bear arms. When a statute conflicts with what a prosecutor reasonably believes the supreme law requires, the oath points toward the Constitution, not the statute. That’s not lawlessness. That’s exactly how the constitutional structure is supposed to work. The notion that an elected officer must enforce every law no matter what, or else violate their oath, would mean prosecutors in pre-Heller cities had an “oath obligation” to enforce handgun bans that the Supreme Court later held unconstitutional. Nobody seriously believes that.

On the “11 states have similar laws” argument: that is not a constitutional argument. The number of states that have passed a law tells you nothing about whether that law comports with Heller and Bruen. At various points in American history, a substantial majority of states had laws that were later held unconstitutional. Head counts don’t determine constitutional validity.

On the cert denials: Hashmi cited the Supreme Court’s June 2, 2025 denial in Snope v. Brown (Maryland’s AR ban) and a denial in the Rhode Island magazine case as vindication. This is a serious misreading of what cert denials mean. A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits. It means the Court chose not to take up the case at that time, for reasons it doesn’t explain. It is not a holding that the Fourth Circuit got it right. It does not bind any other circuit. The Court said as much.

What actually happened in Snope is in some ways more favorable to the Second Amendment than Hashmi wants to acknowledge. Justice Thomas dissented from the denial, and Justices Alito and Gorsuch both indicated they would have granted certiorari. Thomas wrote that the AR-15 is plainly an “arm” under the Second Amendment’s text, that the burden was on Maryland to show its ban fit this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, and that the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning treating the most popular rifle in America as “dangerous and unusual” was dubious. Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately to stress that the denial was not an endorsement of the Fourth Circuit’s decision. He noted that Americans own an estimated 20 to 30 million AR-15s and that the rifle is legal in 41 of the 50 states, which gives petitioners “a strong argument that AR-15s are in ‘common use’ by law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment under Heller.” He concluded that the Court “should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.”

That is four justices signaling, on the record, that this issue is not resolved. The AR-15 question is explicitly live at the Supreme Court. The cert denial bought the Fourth Circuit maybe a year or two of breathing room, not permanent vindication.

The constitutional core

Under Heller, arms in common use for lawful purposes cannot be banned outright. Under Bruen, any restriction must be consistent with the historical tradition of firearms regulation in America. The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the country. Handguns and the pistols targeted by SB 749 are used by millions of law-abiding Americans for home defense, competition, and carry. Magazines over 15 rounds are standard configuration for a huge share of semi-automatic pistols sold in America.

When Hashmi says prosecutors are violating their oath by refusing to enforce SB 749, what she’s actually saying is that their oath requires them to enforce a law that is, in my view and in the view of these prosecutors, itself in violation of the supreme law of the land. The Constitutional officers who are refusing are not ignoring their oath. They’re applying it.

Where this goes

The legal challenges are moving in parallel. Five lawsuits are already in flight against SB 749. The non-enforcement coalition is a political and practical pressure campaign while the courts work through those cases. Every month that passes without prosecutions under SB 749 weakens the law’s practical authority and strengthens the argument that it lacks democratic legitimacy in the communities it purports to govern.

Spanberger and Hashmi pushed through a law on a party-line vote, signed it, and are now watching a growing list of the Commonwealth’s own constitutional officers refuse to implement it. That’s not dysfunction. That’s the structure of the Virginia constitutional system doing exactly what it was designed to do: ensuring that prosecutorial power cannot simply be handed down from Richmond as an instrument of policy enforcement. The governor controls the executive, not the Commonwealth’s Attorneys. Those officers answer to their voters.

Fourteen and climbing. The momentum belongs to the people resisting this law.