Denied.

In late May, Attorney General Jay Jones and a group of allied commonwealth’s attorneys asked the Supreme Court of Virginia to invoke the Multiple Claimant Litigation Act — a request to sweep Crump, Santolla, Curtis, and Black out of the four county courthouses where they were filed and merge them into one consolidated proceeding, in one venue, before one bench.

On June 3, Chief Justice Cleo E. Powell appointed three circuit judges — Richard S. Wallerstein Jr., J. William Watson Jr., and Helivi L. Holland — to decide whether the state’s request met the Act’s standard. Argument came the morning of July 6.

Gun Owners of America — a party in Crump — announced the result within about an hour: consolidation denied. In GOA’s words, the cases “can now proceed in their own courts.”

The Multiple Claimant Litigation Act is Virginia’s mass-tort machinery. It exists so that when hundreds of people sue over the same defective product or the same asbestos exposure, the Commonwealth doesn’t run hundreds of identical trials. That is the tool the Attorney General picked up and pointed at four constitutional challenges — brought by different plaintiffs, on different legal theories, in four different counties.

A statute is not an asbestos pile. The plaintiffs’ opposition said the quiet part plainly: these cases share a target, not a transaction — one pleads only the Virginia Constitution, one is a militia-clause fight, one raises the right to hunt, and the plaintiffs range from a single gun owner to Paul Clement’s industry clients. And they told the court what the request was really for. Here is what consolidation would have bought the state:

The state’s counter, in its application: without a transfer, rulings in four courts “will proceed contemporaneously and lead to confusion and chaos.” Understand what that means. Losing in three courtrooms at once is not chaos. It is due process, working. On July 6, three judges declined to make it stop.

Remember what is actually being protected here. Crump is the statewide injunction — the order that barred the State Police from enforcing the sale ban, the magazine ban, and the carry expansion before any of it ever switched on, running through December 31, 2026 or a final order. Santolla is the second shield, reaching to July 1, 2027. Both were won in front of judges the state was trying to leave behind.

A preliminary injunction is an interlocutory order. Move the case, and the new court handling “coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings” can be asked to revisit it. The state already tried the direct route — it asked Judge Martin to shrink his injunction to Lancaster County and to stay it pending appeal, and he refused both. Consolidation was the do-over: a brand-new bench, a fresh motion, the same ask.

There is no do-over. The injunctions stay with the judges who granted them — welded to the dockets where they were won.

You do not have to take my word for what a courtroom is worth. Virginia ran the experiment in one week, on the same statute and the same constitutional clause.

The spread of legal theories is not an accident — it is strategy. Crump pleads only the Virginia Constitution, so the Fourth Circuit’s Bianchi precedent can never touch it. McDonald is the clean federal cert vehicle. Black brings the industry and the right-to-hunt clause. Curtis forces the militia-clause question head-on. Consolidation would have collapsed four independent chances into one roll of the dice, decided by one judge. The panel kept all four alive — four records, four rulings, four paths up.

Here is the part most coverage will miss: the consolidation application was doing damage while nobody ruled on it. The moment the panel existed, Lancaster stayed Crump and cancelled the June 12 injunction hearing — 19 days before the ban’s start date. It took an emergency motion and a mandamus petition to the Supreme Court of Virginia to get that hearing back. Black never got one at all: injunction papers stamped May 19, and seven weeks of silence while the transfer request hung over the docket.

And the plaintiffs’ opposition warned exactly where this was headed: the panel process “may take several months.” Months of re-briefing, months of frozen dockets, months of a ban defended by delay instead of argument.

That clock got torn up on the morning of July 6.

Put July 6 where it belongs — at the end of the worst two-week stretch any gun-control law has ever had in this state. Since June 25, every court, every vote, and every filing has gone against SB 749.

Richmond wanted one courtroom for a reason: it cannot defend this law in six. As of July 6, it has to.