Virginia's assault weapons ban is blocked, and the Second Amendment had nothing to do with it

The bottom line

A Lancaster County judge issued a statewide temporary injunction on June 25, 2026, blocking Virginia’s new assault firearms and magazine ban from taking effect July 1. The case is Crump v. Katz, and what makes it the strongest of the six legal challenges to SB 749 is what it omits entirely: there is no Second Amendment claim anywhere in the complaint. The entire case runs on Article I, Section 13 of the Virginia Constitution, and that choice is the whole reason it’s working.

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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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The federal landscape the lawyers were deliberately avoiding

Before explaining why the state constitutional theory matters so much, I need to explain the terrain the attorneys in Crump v. Katz chose to route around.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over Virginia. Last year, that court handed down Snope v. Brown, a 10-5 en banc ruling upholding Maryland’s assault weapons ban under the Bruen text-history-tradition framework. The majority held that AR-15s and similar semi-automatic rifles fall outside Second Amendment protection because they are supposedly “military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations,” a theory I find constitutionally bankrupt but which is now the law of the circuit. SCOTUS denied cert in June 2025. Only Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas indicated they would have taken the case. Four votes were required.

That means any federal Second Amendment challenge to SB 749 filed in Virginia district court immediately faces hostile circuit precedent before it even gets close to SCOTUS. Even if SCOTUS eventually grants cert on an assault weapons case, and I believe it eventually will have to, the federal route through the Fourth Circuit could burn years and still produce injunctions that courts refuse to maintain.

The attorneys behind Crump v. Katz found a better path. They filed in state circuit court on state constitutional grounds, and the Fourth Circuit has zero jurisdiction over what they are doing. The Snope v. Brown ruling is legally irrelevant to a claim brought under the Virginia Constitution. That is not a side effect of their strategy. It is the entire point.

What Article I, Section 13 actually says

Virginia’s Bill of Rights is one of the oldest constitutional documents in the English-speaking world. George Mason drafted it in 1776, and it protected Virginians’ rights before the United States existed as a nation. Article I, Section 13 reads in full: “That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The first clause, “composed of the body of the people,” is not ambiguous. Mason was not describing a professional standing army or a government-licensed subset of citizens. He was describing everyone. The militia is the people, in their capacity as free persons capable of defending a free state. This was not controversial in 1776. It was the universal understanding of how republics survive.

The individual right clause, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” was formally added in the 1971 constitutional revision. AG Jay Jones argues that the sponsors of that 1971 language stated it created “no additional rights” and would not interfere with gun regulations. I find this argument weak. Courts interpret constitutional text, not private legislative statements about what sponsors hoped the text would accomplish after the fact. The text says “shall not be infringed.” That is as plain as constitutional language gets.

Virginia jurist St. George Tucker, whom legal historians call “The American Blackstone,” wrote in 1803 that the right of self-defense is “the first law of nature” and that wherever governments prohibit it “under any color or pretext whatsoever, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.” Tucker was a Virginian commenting on Virginia law and the federal constitutional framework simultaneously. Article I, Section 13 carries that founding-era understanding.

The case and what the court found

John Crump, an Ammoland journalist and Virginia Citizens Defense League member, is the named plaintiff. Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation, and VCDL are backing the litigation with a serious, well-funded legal team. The defendant is Virginia State Police Superintendent Colonel Jeffery Katz, named because VSP is the entity responsible for enforcing the ban.

Judge John Martin of Lancaster County found that SB 749 likely violates Article I, Section 13. That is the merits prong of the temporary injunction analysis: the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the legal question when the case is fully litigated. Courts do not grant statewide preliminary injunctions casually. Martin’s ruling signals that all four factors courts weigh (likelihood of success, irreparable harm, balance of equities, public interest) pointed toward blocking enforcement while the case moves forward.

The injunction covers SB 749 (the assault firearms measure) and SB 727. Virginia State Police may not enforce the sale, manufacture, import, purchase, or transfer prohibitions on covered semi-automatic firearms or magazines capable of holding more than 15 rounds while the order is in effect. This is a temporary injunction, the first legal checkpoint in this fight, not a permanent ruling that SB 749 is unconstitutional. What it represents is a preliminary judicial determination that the challengers have a serious argument and that the harm from allowing enforcement to proceed would be irreparable.

The statutory problems baked into the bill

The Art. I §13 constitutional claim is the headline, but the complaint also raises statutory defects in SB 749 that reflect careless drafting, the kind that shouldn’t survive in a bill this prominent.

The feature-based definition applies different tests across weapon types. Rifles and pistols are classified as assault firearms if they have “one or more” of the prohibited features. Shotguns are classified based on “one” prohibited feature. Under the standard interpretive canon that different words carry different meanings, a shotgun with two banned features might not satisfy the “one” test the legislature itself wrote. The most nationally watched gun bill in the country in 2026 and the drafters left a gap in their own feature test.

The magazine ban prohibits import, sale, barter, transfer, and purchase of magazines over 15 rounds. It does not prohibit manufacture. That omission looks unintentional, but it is in the enrolled text. There is also a physical-equivalence problem: the statute bans magazines by what a device “can accept” in terms of rounds, but a standard-capacity 5.56 magazine is physically identical to a 10-round SOCOM magazine. Actual capacity depends on what caliber is loaded. The complaint asked the court to address magazines that hold at or under 15 rounds in the caliber they are designed for, even if the physical body could theoretically accept more of a different cartridge. These are not frivolous arguments. They reflect genuine legislative sloppiness.

Winning on procedural or statutory grounds is not a lesser victory than winning on constitutional grounds. Dead is dead. If SB 749 falls because the legislature couldn’t proofread its own feature test, the guns are still legal.

Where this goes from here

Jay Jones announced his appeal to the Virginia Court of Appeals the day after the ruling. He will argue the injunction should be stayed pending appeal and that the Lancaster ruling jumps the queue ahead of the SCOVA consolidation panel that was evaluating whether to consolidate several pending challenges into one proceeding. I think that argument is weak. The consolidation panel had not even requested briefs from the parties when the ban was days from taking effect. Jones cannot credibly claim an inactive consolidation process should preclude emergency relief.

The more important long-range question is SCOVA. Earlier this year, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a gun restriction 4-3 in Scott v. McDougle, which shows it is willing to engage with state constitutional gun rights in a principled way. If Crump v. Katz reaches SCOVA and the majority reads Article I, Section 13 as the individual right the text plainly supports, SB 749 could be struck down permanently, and no federal court could reverse that interpretation of state law. States are the final word on what their own constitutions mean. That is federalism working in our favor.

The same week this injunction came down, SCOTUS acted against Hawaii’s “vampire rule,” the default ban on concealed carry across private property open to the public. It was a real federal Second Amendment win. But the Lancaster injunction, built on entirely different legal ground, may ultimately matter more for Virginia gun owners, because it operates in a judicial space where the Fourth Circuit cannot interfere.

I predicted we would see legal movement before July 1. I did not expect it to be this decisive this fast. Spanberger and Jones pushed through a sweeping gun ban on sloppy statutory drafting and a constitutional theory their own state’s Bill of Rights argues against. A Lancaster County judge looked at the text of Virginia’s 250-year-old constitutional commitment to an armed people and said: no, you cannot just ignore this. That is where we are. The fight continues, but we are winning.