BREAKING: DOJ Sues Virginia Over Unconstitutional AR-15 Ban

The Trump Justice Department made good on a promise this week, filing a federal lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Virginia State Police just hours before the state’s new so-called “assault firearms” ban was set to take effect. The suit represents the latest and most direct confrontation yet between the Trump administration and blue states determined to restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did not mince words in announcing the lawsuit. “The Constitution is not a suggestion, and the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Blanche said in a statement released alongside the filing.

“This Justice Department has done more to protect the Second Amendment than any administration in our nation’s history, and we will continue to do so whenever necessary.”

The law at the center of the dispute, Senate Bill 749, was signed by Democrat Governor Abigail Spanberger, a former member of the gun control group Moms Demand Action, earlier this year.

The legislation makes it a Class 1 misdemeanor to import, manufacture, sell, purchase, or transfer what the state defines as an “assault firearm,” a category that explicitly includes the AR-15-style rifle, the single most popular rifle in America. The bill also separately restricts magazines holding more than fifteen rounds.

The Justice Department’s fifteen-page complaint leans heavily on Virginia’s own history as the birthplace of American liberty, invoking James Madison, who not only helped draft the Constitution but also authored the Bill of Rights, which became effective in 1791 when Virginia became the eleventh state to ratify it.

“Virginians can be justly proud of their centuries-long tradition of leadership in the cause of liberty,” the complaint reads, before adding pointedly that “that tradition was recently besmirched by the Virginia legislature’s enactment of SB749.”

Rather than bringing a straightforward constitutional challenge, the DOJ chose an unusual legal vehicle for this case, invoking a federal civil rights statute typically reserved for police misconduct investigations. The department argues that Virginia State Police enforcement of an unconstitutional law amounts to a “pattern or practice” of conduct that deprives Virginians of their constitutional rights, a novel approach that signals just how aggressively the administration intends to pursue Second Amendment cases going forward.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, noted that this lawsuit was no surprise to Virginia officials.

“On April 10, I promised Governor Spanberger that we would sue Virginia if she signed this unconstitutional weapons ban into law. I keep my promises,” Dhillon said. She added that law-abiding Americans “should not have to live under threat of criminal sanction for simply exercising their Second Amendment right to possess arms owned by millions of their fellow citizens.”

The lawsuit leans on the Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen decision, arguing that Virginia’s ban cannot survive the historical test the Court laid out for evaluating modern gun restrictions. Under Bruen, a firearm regulation must be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of arms regulation dating back to the founding era. The DOJ argues plainly that no such historical tradition exists for banning rifles like the AR-15, which are, in the government’s words, “in common use” by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, including home defense, hunting, recreation, and competitive shooting.

The complaint cites estimates that tens of millions of AR-15-style rifles are currently in circulation across the country, a figure the department says makes clear these are not fringe or unusual weapons but rather mainstream firearms owned by ordinary Americans in every state.

The filing also notes that the very term “assault weapon” is itself a political invention, pointing out that the phrase did not exist in the firearms lexicon before 1989, when anti-gun activists coined it specifically to expand the category of weapons they hoped to ban.

That history was memorably highlighted by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in a prior dissenting opinion, in which he wrote that the term was “developed by anti-gun publicists to expand the category of assault rifles so as to allow an attack on as many additional firearms as possible on the basis of undefined ‘evil’ appearance.”

The DOJ’s complaint echoes that same skepticism toward what it calls the “politically charged rhetoric” baked into Virginia’s statute.

Notably, the complaint acknowledges an inconvenient reality for the government’s position: current precedent from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Virginia, actually cuts against the DOJ’s argument. In the case Bianchi v. Brown, the appeals court upheld Maryland’s own assault weapons ban. Rather than avoid that precedent, the Justice Department directly confronts it, arguing in the complaint that the case was wrongly decided and should be overturned.

The timing of the lawsuit is no accident. It comes just one day after the Supreme Court agreed to hear two major Second Amendment cases next term, Viramontes v. Cook County out of Illinois and Grant v. Higgins out of Connecticut, both of which challenge similar bans on AR-15-style rifles. Together with the Virginia case, these lawsuits are setting the stage for what could be the most consequential Second Amendment showdown at the nation’s highest court in years.

Assistant Attorney General Dhillon previewed the administration’s confidence in this fight back in May during an appearance on “Just the News, No Noise,” predicting that the Supreme Court will ultimately rule that AR-15s are constitutionally protected. “We intend to make sure they do that,” she said at the time, a promise that now appears to be playing out in real time across multiple federal courts.

On the ground in Virginia, the new law has already faced fierce resistance well before the DOJ got involved. A statewide preliminary injunction against the gun and magazine bans was secured by the National Rifle Association in Washington County just days before the federal suit was filed, and another injunction was granted in Lancaster County the week prior. Numerous local Commonwealth’s attorneys and sheriffs across the state have publicly announced they will refuse to enforce or prosecute anyone under the new restrictions, arguing the law is unconstitutional on its face.

Page County Commonwealth’s Attorney Chapman L. Good Sr. put it plainly in a letter to his county sheriff, explaining he would not be prosecuting cases under the ban. “The Second Amendment guarantees our God given right to self-defense by ensuring that the right ‘to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,'” Good wrote, adding that the amendment also makes clear that a well-regulated militia is “necessary to the security of a free State.”

The National Rifle Association praised the federal government’s intervention. NRA-ILA Executive Director John Commerford said the organization was “deeply grateful that the Department of Justice is working hand-in-hand with us to protect the fundamental, God-given rights of law-abiding Americans,” and credited the Trump administration with consistently standing firm on Second Amendment issues throughout its time in office.

Virginia officials, unsurprisingly, are preparing to fight back. A spokesperson for Democrat Attorney General Jay Jones said the office would review the federal complaint and vowed to “defend Virginia’s assault weapons ban against the Trump DOJ’s misuse of the Civil Rights Division,” insisting the law “keeps Virginians safe, protects law enforcement, and safeguards communities across the Commonwealth.” That framing, of course, ignores the DOJ’s own findings that long guns of any kind, including rifles like the AR-15, are used in a small fraction of violent crime compared to handguns, knives, and even blunt objects or bare hands.

This is not the only front in the administration’s broader campaign against state gun restrictions. The same week it filed suit against Virginia, the Justice Department also sued California over that state’s Glock ban and its restrictive “Handgun Roster,” which severely limits which legal firearms residents may purchase. Taken together, these dual filings send an unmistakable signal that the administration views state-level gun control laws, wherever they arise, as ripe targets for federal legal challenge.

Legal observers note that this represents part of a much larger pattern under the current Justice Department, which has taken an unusually aggressive posture in challenging state and local governments across a range of issues where officials believe federal constitutional rights are being trampled. Former U.S. Attorney John Fishwick, discussing the Virginia case, noted that regardless of the political framing on either side, the core legal question is a straightforward one for a federal judge to decide: does the ban violate the Second Amendment or not.

With the Supreme Court now set to weigh in on similar AR-15 bans out of Illinois and Connecticut next term, and with the Virginia case now working its way through the federal court system alongside multiple state court injunctions already in place, the fight over America’s most popular rifle appears headed for a final reckoning at the nation’s highest court. For gun owners across the country who have watched blue states steadily chip away at their Second Amendment rights in recent years, the Justice Department’s willingness to step in and fight on their behalf marks a significant and welcome escalation in the defense of a right the founders considered fundamental to a free society.