Blocked

On Thursday afternoon, a judge in rural Lancaster County did what every prosecutor in Richmond insisted no court would do before July 1. He froze the entire package. The sale, purchase, transfer, manufacture, and import of every firearm the Commonwealth decided to brand an "assault firearm." Every magazine over fifteen rounds. The expanded carry ban that stripped permit holders of their exemption. All of it, paused across the whole state, with six days left on the clock.

He did it without touching the Second Amendment. The plaintiffs never raised it. They built their case entirely on Article I, Section 13 of the Virginia Constitution, the Commonwealth's own right to keep and bear arms. That is the one ground the hostile federal Fourth Circuit has no power to touch. The state walked into a courtroom it could not appeal out of the easy way, and it lost.

To grant a preliminary injunction in Virginia, a judge has to be convinced of two things at once. That the plaintiffs are likely to win when the case is fully tried, and that they would suffer irreparable harm if the ban took effect while the case played out. Judge Martin found both. Then the Commonwealth asked him to do two things to soften the blow: limit the order to Lancaster County, and stay it so the ban could still start July 1 while the state appealed. He refused both from the bench.

There is an irony in who got enjoined. The defendant, State Police Superintendent Colonel Jeffrey Katz, is Governor Spanberger's own appointee. The officer she installed in January is now the officer a court has ordered not to enforce her signature law.

There is no written opinion yet, so nobody should put words in the judge's mouth about his exact reasoning. What we have is the order itself, reported by the journalists in the room, and it is about as clean a win as a circuit-court hearing produces. A statewide freeze, no carve-out for the state, no pause for the appeal.

Read the complaint and you will not find the words "Second Amendment" anywhere in it. That is not an oversight. It is the whole plan. The federal Fourth Circuit, which covers Virginia, has already blessed assault-weapons bans in Bianchi v. Brown and Kolbe v. Hogan, holding that rifles like the AR-15 fall outside Second Amendment protection. Sue under the federal Constitution and you walk straight into that buzzsaw.

So the plaintiffs did not. They sued under Virginia's own constitution, and the Fourth Circuit has no authority over what that document means. Only Virginia's own courts do. It is a state question, decided by a state judge, on state ground the federal precedent cannot reach. The Commonwealth's answer to that is its most desperate argument of all: that Article I, Section 13 protects no individual right at all, only a collective militia. In Lancaster County, that argument lost.

Look at how the judge got there. To decide what Article I, Section 13 protects, he reached for the same text-and-history test the Supreme Court built in Bruen for the Second Amendment. The plaintiffs never pleaded the federal right. Its logic walked into state court anyway.

Here is the wrinkle nobody on our side should hide. The judge did not give Gun Owners of America or the Virginia Citizens Defense League standing to sue as organizations. He denied it. What he found was that the individual plaintiff, John Crump, a Virginia gun owner with concrete plans to acquire one of these firearms after July 1, had a real, personal injury. And one plaintiff with standing is all it takes to reach the injunction.

So the entire statewide freeze rests on a single citizen's standing, not on the groups. That is not a weakness in the win. It is a reminder of how these cases actually move. It takes one person the law is about to make a criminal, standing in the right courtroom, to stop the whole machine.

The only defendant named in this case is the Superintendent of the Virginia State Police. So the order, on its face, binds the State Police. Whether it also binds a commonwealth's attorney or a local department in Fairfax, Arlington, Alexandria, or Richmond is genuinely unsettled, and with no written order there is nothing yet to parse on that point. Take that seriously if you are a Virginian planning around July 1.

But look at the map before you assume the worst. A bloc of elected Virginia prosecutors had already announced, in writing, that they would not enforce this ban in their counties at all, injunction or no injunction. Between the prosecutors who refuse and a State Police that is now ordered to stand down, the ground where this law can actually be enforced on July 1 is a great deal smaller than the people who wrote it imagined.

See the prosecutors who refuse →

Within hours, Attorney General Jay Jones put out a statement promising to fight the order. The path from here is an emergency motion to stay the injunction, then an appeal up to the Virginia Court of Appeals and, if it goes that far, the Supreme Court of Virginia. There is also a three-judge panel the state asked for, appointed June 3, weighing whether to consolidate the four state cases into one. As of today, no stay has been confirmed filed, and no appellate court has touched the injunction. It stands.

The Commonwealth spent a year telling Virginians this ban was settled, constitutional, inevitable. It took one circuit judge, one individual plaintiff, and one sentence in the Virginia Constitution to stop it cold with six days to spare. The ban is not dead. It is enjoined, and the fight moves up the ladder to people in robes who have not weighed in yet.

But understand exactly what happened on June 25. The state asked a judge to let it start enforcing on July 1 while it appealed. He said no. So on the morning this law was written to take effect, it takes effect on no one the State Police can reach. That is what a win looks like before the appeal. Now we hold it.