Blue State Acts As If Major SCOTUS 2A Decisions Don’t Matter While Defending Semi-Auto Gun Ban

The office of Democratic Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones glossed over multiple Supreme Court decisions on the Second Amendment in a brief defending a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms.

Multiple pro-Second Amendment organizations filed suit after Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed SB 749, which banned so-called “assault weapons.” In the response to a suit filed by Gun Owners of America in Lancaster County Circuit Court, Jones’ office questioned why GOA’s complaint mentioned landmark United States Supreme Court decisions like Heller and Bruen, claiming that instead the Virginia Constitution’s provision was tied to militia service.

“The emphasized clause was added in 1971 and did not exist in any prior Constitution of Virginia. Rather than placing it in a free-standing section, the drafters embedded it inside the militia provision, joined to the militia clause by the conjunctive adverb ‘therefore,’” the Virginia Attorney General’s office claimed. “That structure tied the new clause to the language that preceded it, making the right-to-bear-arms clause a consequence of the militia clause, not a free-standing guarantee.”

Gun Owners of America Senior Vice President Erich Pratt scoffed at the reasoning from Jones’ office.

“Virginia is asking the court to do exactly what the Supreme Court rejected in Heller: pretend that a constitutional right with language nearly identical to the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right at all,” Pratt told the Daily Caller News Foundation