The NRA did not surrender in Virginia, it out-maneuvered the Fourth Circuit

The bottom line

The headlines saying the NRA killed its own lawsuit against Virginia’s gun ban have it backward. A consent stay is not a white flag. It is the only rational move for a case built to lose in the Fourth Circuit on its way to a Supreme Court that is about to settle this question for good.

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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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What actually happened

On July 23, 2026, lawyers for the NRA, the Firearms Policy Coalition, the Second Amendment Foundation, and two Virginia gun owners, Justin McDonald of Goochland County and Anthony Groeneveld of Prince William County, filed a motion in McDonald v. Katz, No. 1:26-cv-01305-LMB-WEF, in the Eastern District of Virginia. The motion asked Judge Leonie M. Brinkema to stay the entire case. Every deadline. Every proceeding. And here’s the detail that should have been the headline instead of the clickbait: the state consented. Virginia’s own lawyers agreed to the pause. Judge Brinkema granted it the next day, July 24, a full week before the Commonwealth’s response was even due.

I saw the framing everywhere within hours. The NRA quit. The NRA folded. Some of it came from people who should know better, and some of it came from people who wanted it to be true because it fits a narrative they’ve been pushing for years about Second Amendment groups being toothless. Neither read survives contact with the actual filing.

Read paragraph six before you say a word

Here’s what nobody covering this bothered to do: open the complaint. Not the stay motion from July 23. The original complaint, filed May 14, more than two months before the stay anyone’s calling a betrayal. Paragraph six says the relief the plaintiffs are seeking is foreclosed by Bianchi v. Brown, the Fourth Circuit’s en banc ruling upholding Maryland’s so-called assault weapons ban, and by Kolbe v. Hogan, the earlier en banc decision that set the template Bianchi followed. Then it says the plaintiffs are asking the court to overrule those cases, and it specifies “a court competent to do so.”

Nobody writes that sentence in a moment of panic. It is a plan, laid out in the founding document of the lawsuit, months before anyone filed a stay motion. Lawyers who write sentences like that know exactly what district court they are standing in front of and exactly what that district court is bound to do. They wrote it anyway, because the sentence was never aimed at Judge Brinkema. It was aimed at a Supreme Court docket.

Why a district judge in this circuit cannot rule for you

I want to be blunt about something a lot of commentary glosses over. Bianchi and Kolbe are binding precedent in the Fourth Circuit, and Virginia sits in the Fourth Circuit. A district judge does not get to decide she personally disagrees with the circuit’s en banc holding and rule the opposite way. That is not how the judicial hierarchy works, and pretending otherwise does gun owners no favors. If McDonald had proceeded to a merits ruling this summer, Judge Brinkema would have been required to deny it, because the law of the circuit says the relief cannot be granted. Full stop.

So the question was never whether they could win in Alexandria. It was how to get out of Alexandria and onto a Supreme Court calendar as fast and as cheaply as possible. Litigating a case you know is going to lose, on the current record, in the current circuit, means spending donor money to generate a bad ruling for the sole purpose of appealing it. That is a legitimate strategy in some circumstances. It is not the only one, and in this case it is not even the smart one, because something better landed in their lap on June 30.

The cert grant changes the math entirely

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, and Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, consolidating them to decide whether the Second Amendment protects the AR-15 and similarly configured semi-automatic rifles as arms in common use. That is the exact question sitting underneath every assault weapons ban case in the country, including this one. The stay memo in McDonald says outright that the outcome in Viramontes and Grant will have direct, controlling weight on this case. Once the Supreme Court rules, there is no more need to manufacture a loss at the district level and grind through a Fourth Circuit appeal to get there. The vehicle already exists. It is on the Court’s docket right now.

I think it matters who chose to take this case. Nobody forced the Supreme Court’s hand here the way, say, the government forced its hand on the birthright citizenship litigation. The Court had years of circuit splits and years of chances to deny cert on an AR-15 case and pass. It didn’t. It reached out and grabbed Viramontes and Grant specifically, and I don’t think you do that if you’re planning to rubber-stamp the status quo that every circuit except the Third has settled into. I say that with real confidence, not blind confidence. Surprises happen at the Supreme Court, and I’m not going to pretend this is a lock. But when the Court chooses its case rather than having one thrust upon it, that tells you something about the direction it intends to go.

Nobody in Virginia loses coverage while this waits

The other reason this stay costs plaintiffs nothing is one most of the outrage completely ignores. As of July 21, 2026, the statewide preliminary injunction in Santolla v. Katz out of Washington County Circuit Court already blocks enforcement of the same statutes McDonald is challenging, Va. Code §§ 18.2-287.4:1 and 18.2-309.1, against every law enforcement officer and Commonwealth’s Attorney in the state. The stay memo cites this directly. Virginians are not sitting exposed while McDonald sleeps. They are already covered by a separate order that reaches further than a single federal district ruling ever could this summer. Pausing the federal case doesn’t leave a gap. It lets a functioning shield stay up while a stronger weapon gets built somewhere else.

The memo also points to Miller v. Bonta in the Ninth Circuit, where the appeals court delayed California’s own assault weapons ban litigation on its own initiative on July 1, 2026, without either side asking. When courts across two different circuits independently reach the same conclusion, that the AR-15 cert grant should pause parallel litigation, it stops looking like one group’s peculiar choice and starts looking like the obvious read of where the law is heading.

A stay is not a dismissal, and words matter here

The plaintiffs dropped nothing. Every count in the complaint is still pending, exactly as written on May 14. No judgment was entered against them, which means there is nothing to appeal because nothing went wrong. Virginia never even had to file an answer to the complaint. The case sits exactly where it was procedurally, frozen, with a joint status report and a proposed schedule due thirty days after the Supreme Court’s mandates issue in both Viramontes and Grant. That is the entire mechanism. It is not complicated, and it is not shameful.

What frustrates me about the coverage is how casually people throw around words like “killed” and “surrendered” for what is, in plain terms, a scheduling decision made by lawyers who read the room correctly. Seventy-one days after filing, seven days before their response was due, the state agreed to press pause because both sides know the answer is coming from a higher court within the year. Calling that weakness gets it backward. It is knowing which fight to have and when to have it, and I would rather have lawyers who understand that difference than lawyers who burn a case on a predetermined loss just to look busy.