On June 10, 2026, Circuit Court Judge John S. Martin stayed all proceedings in Crump v. Katz, the GOA and VCDL state-court challenge to Virginia's assault…
The bottom line
On June 10, 2026, Circuit Court Judge John S. Martin stayed all proceedings in Crump v. Katz, the GOA and VCDL state-court challenge to Virginia’s assault weapons ban, and cancelled the injunction hearing that was supposed to happen Friday. Attorney General Jay Jones got a Virginia Supreme Court three-judge panel convened to consolidate the multiple pending challenges, and that procedural move is what killed any chance of a pre-July 1 order. Real gun owners across Virginia are now going to wake up on July 1 under a law that has not been tested in court.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
What the stay actually means and why it happened
The easy story here is that a judge killed the hearing. The real story is more infuriating.
Crump v. Katz is filed in Lancaster County Circuit Court. The plaintiffs are Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, and John Crump, an AmmoLand journalist and VCDL member. The defendant is Col. Jeffrey Katz, Superintendent of the Virginia State Police, standing in as the enforcement arm of SB 749 and SB 727. The plaintiffs had a hearing on the books for Friday to argue for a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction that would have blocked the ban from taking effect July 1.
Judge Martin issued an order staying all proceedings. The reason wasn’t some independent judgment that the case lacks merit. The Virginia Supreme Court, responding to Attorney General Jay Jones’s push to consolidate all of the pending assault-weapons-ban lawsuits filed in four different counties, appointed a three-judge panel to decide where everything gets centralized. That’s what triggered the stay. The three-judge panel hasn’t even set a briefing schedule yet, which means there is zero chance of an emergency ruling before July 1.
The plaintiffs immediately filed an emergency response opposing the stay. They argued, correctly, that there’s no legal reason the consolidation process requires halting proceedings in a case that has an imminent harm deadline. The consolidation panel has not taken any action. The clock is running. And yet here we are.
This is what procedural gamesmanship looks like when it’s wielded skillfully. Jones asked for consolidation, the Supreme Court appointed a panel, and now every pending challenge is treading water while July 1 gets closer. Spanberger signed SB 749. Jones is defending it. And together they have managed, through a procedural mechanism that sounds completely neutral, to run the clock out past the effective date. Credit where it’s due as a legal strategy. It’s also genuinely contemptible.
Why this case was the strongest challenge in play
Crump v. Katz was, in my view, the most dangerous suit Virginia’s gun-control apparatus faced, and that is exactly why Jones worked so hard to defuse it.
The lawsuit is built entirely on the Virginia Constitution, specifically Article I, Section 13, plus statutory-interpretation and vagueness arguments against the bill’s actual text. There is no federal Second Amendment claim. That is a deliberate choice, and a brilliant one. Federal claims in the Fourth Circuit are a near-certain loss right now. Bruen didn’t save the Maryland assault-weapons ban in the Fourth Circuit, and Virginia plaintiffs know it. By staying entirely in state court on state-constitutional grounds, GOA and VCDL cut off Jones’s ability to invoke the federal appellate structure that has been hostile to Heller and Bruen in this region.
Article I, Section 13 of the Virginia Constitution says the right of the people to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.” Same operative clause as the Second Amendment, with the added language about a militia “composed of the body of the people, trained to arms.” The Commonwealth’s defense in this case argues that Article I, Section 13 protects no individual right whatsoever, only a collective right tied to organized militia service. That is a strikingly aggressive position. Read the text. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That is not ambiguous. The Commonwealth is asking a Virginia court to hold that those words, in the Virginia Constitution, protect nothing that any individual Virginian can invoke. That argument deserves to lose badly, and I think it will, eventually.
The statutory drafting holes are real and serious
Beyond the constitutional theory, the plaintiffs have statutory-interpretation arguments against SB 749 that I think are genuinely strong, and they matter because they expose how carelessly this law was written.
First, the magazine provision bans devices based on what they “can accept,” meaning physical capacity. A standard 30-round 5.56 magazine and a SOCOM-caliber magazine designed for 15 or fewer larger rounds are physically identical in many cases, the same stamped metal box. Which one is contraband depends not on what it holds but on what ammunition you happen to feed it. That’s an arbitrary line that raises serious vagueness concerns.
Second, the magazine ban covers import, sale, barter, transfer, and purchase. It says nothing about manufacture. Under a basic reading of the statute, building a magazine from a parts kit is not prohibited conduct. That’s a gaping hole, and courts applying strict construction of penal statutes take gaps like that seriously.
Third, the assault-firearms definition applies to rifles and pistols by reference to “one or more” prohibited features, but applies to shotguns using “any one” feature. Under the canon that different statutory words carry different meanings, the legislature arguably wrote different standards into the same law without meaning to. That kind of drafting inconsistency is exactly what statutory-vagueness challenges are built on.
These aren’t frivolous arguments. They’re the kind of thing that can get a law struck on grounds short of a full constitutional holding, and they’re the kind of thing that makes prosecutors nervous about enforcement. Jones knows this, which is part of why getting this case consolidated and delayed matters so much to him.
SB 727 and the hollow right to bear
Crump v. Katz is also the only pending challenge directly attacking SB 727, the companion carry restriction. SB 727 and its identical companion HB 1524 ban carrying a loaded assault firearm in 13 specific Virginia localities: Alexandria, Chesapeake, Fairfax city, Falls Church, Newport News, Norfolk, Richmond, Virginia Beach, and the counties of Arlington, Fairfax, Henrico, Loudoun, and Prince William. That list is not random. It is Richmond, Virginia Beach, Norfolk, and the entire Northern Virginia corridor. It is the Commonwealth’s entire population core.
Think about what that actually means for a Virginian who legally owns an AR-15 and lives under grandfathering. The law lets you keep the gun. But the moment you leave certain parts of rural Virginia and enter a major city or its surrounding county, you cannot carry it loaded. A right to bear arms that evaporates at the city limits of every major population center in the state is not a right. It’s permission slip conditioned on staying in the right zip code. That argument needed to be made in court before July 1. It won’t be.
July 1 is coming and people are exposed
I am genuinely angry about this outcome. Not because the legal fight is over, it isn’t, but because the procedural delay has real consequences for real people. Anyone who wants to buy a covered rifle, pistol, or magazine is about to lose that option with no court having ruled on whether the ban is even lawful. The ban takes effect July 1. The consolidation panel hasn’t acted. The courts have given no one any relief.
The plaintiffs in Crump v. Katz did almost everything right. They picked the right constitutional theory. They found the real weaknesses in the statute’s text. They filed in state court to avoid the Fourth Circuit. And they got procedurally outmaneuvered by an attorney general who understood that delay, without any ruling on the merits, was enough to win the first round.
Jones doesn’t need to beat these arguments in court before July 1. He just needs July 1 to arrive. Mission accomplished, for now.
The litigation will continue. The constitutional arguments haven’t been addressed. The statutory holes haven’t been filled. I think the ban gets struck eventually, whether in Crump v. Katz, in one of the other pending federal and state challenges, or on petition to the Virginia Supreme Court. But “eventually” is cold comfort for the person trying to figure out what they’re legally allowed to own on July 2.
Get the Weekly Briefing
New analysis delivered every week. Court decisions, case updates, and expert commentary.