Whatever qualifications Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones claims to have as a spokesman on gun-related issues just went flying out of the window.
The rabid Second Amendment opponent was not satisfied with joining other anti-gun AGs in submitting an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in the pending Viramontes case concerning popular sporting rifles.
Instead, he struck out on his own with a separate submission and embarrassed himself in the process.
AG believes stretching definition of machine gun for political purposes is justified
“The Court has already recognized that states may restrict machine gun possession,” Jones wrote. “Machine guns are not ‘Arms’ because they are dangerous and inapt for self-defense. AR-15s are machine guns except that they–at least to start–have semi-automatic fire rather than automatic fire. AR-15s thus bear nearly “all the same features that take machine guns outside the Second Amendment’s protection.”
Is he serious?
It is doubtful that the AG’s self-serving arguments will hold sway with justices. Either AR-15s are indeed machine guns and duly regulated, or they are not, and since they are not, they do not fall under the regulations that govern automatic weapon possession.
Potential illegal acts are no basis for sweeping bans
Jones held that potential modifications, some quite illegal, mean that the most common sporting rifle in the U.S. should be banned outright. This contradicts well-established SCOTUS precedents and is hardly rooted in the nation’s historical tradition of such restrictions.
Bruen’s required test utterly fails, but Jones tries to skip past this inconvenient truth. The AG claimed that the Department of Justice’s position that “all firearms are, by definition, Second Amendment-protected ‘Arms’” is categorically false.
In his eyes, this justifies a sweeping prohibition on weapons owned by tens of millions of law-abiding Americans.
No, Mr. Jones, the pressure is on the federal government to prove it does not infringe on the right to keep and bear arms in every such instance. This separate brief is posturing for political gain and nothing more.
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