A Republican Commonwealth’s Attorney clashed with a local GOP committee after he aided Democratic Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones in defending a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms.
A judge in Lancaster County, Virginia, sided with the Virginia Citizen’s Defense League and Gun Owners of America by putting the ban Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed into law on hold, according to social media posts by VCDL and GOA. Frederick County Commonwealth’s Attorney Ross Spicer was questioned as to why he had joined with Jones to consolidate four separate suits challenging the ban and to have it heard in Richmond in a contentious meeting with the Frederick County Republican Committee.
“This is not a dialogue. You will listen to me. You will be respectful to me. You will not interrupt me. You will let me have my floor,” Spicer said at one point, later saying, “I’m giving you five more seconds and I’m walking out of here. If you want to shut up, then shut up. If you want to hear from me, five, four, three, two, one. Yes.”
After the initial clash, Spicer then began to address the committee regarding calls for him to not enforce the ban, invoking both the United States Constitution and the Virginia Constitution.
“The structure of our governance is such that we have divided government. That doesn’t mean Republicans and Democrats. It means three branches of the government,” Spicer said. “Article One says that the legislature shall legislate statutes; Article Two, the executive branch says, and I quote, by the way, the combo’s attorney is part of the Article Two, the executive, this is what I’m obligated to do under the United States Constitution, ‘Take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ Let me read the analogous section in the Virginia Constitution, ‘the Executive Commons Attorney shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ Does everyone understand what that means?”
“So, when Article One, the Legislature, enacts a statute, it becomes the law then it becomes my purview as an executive, I have but one obligation: To execute that law,” Spicer added after some back and forth during his extended remarks. “Do I like that law? Well, it doesn’t say anything about the not liking the law to faithfully execute it. The Constitution says it shall be faithfully executed, because the logic is that the legislature enacted a statute with the input of you all, the people, and therefore it became a law. So here I am in the middle. I’m supposed to execute the law, and that’s what I am going to do.”
A total of 17 Commonwealth’s Attorneys declared that they would not enforce the ban on so-called “assault weapons,” citing their belief that the law was unconstitutional, according to a June 23 VCDL alert.
“When a statute is enacted… it comes into my lap. If someone doesn’t like it, you know what they do? You go to Article Three,” Spicer said. “They say, hey, courts, this is bullshit, overrule this. You don’t go to Article Two and say, ‘Hey, don’t enforce this.’ That is not how our system of governance works. The legislature enacted it. The executive enforces it. If you don’t like it, go to the judiciary. So here I am in the middle, taking all the slings and arrows from people in this community for doing nothing but adhering to the United States and the Virginia Constitution.”
Under the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and Bruen, firearms in common use for lawful purposes fall under the Second Amendment’s protection. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated in a January release that over 32 million “modern sporting rifles” are “in circulation.”
In his dissent to the 2000 Supreme Court decision in Stenberg v. Carhart, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the term “assault weapons” is a euphemism that gun-control advocates use to gain support for banning modern semi-automatic firearms.
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