Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

Residents Race To Buy Popular Guns Before Virginia’s Ban Takes Effect

[Wikimedia Commons/Public/Ezra Deutsch-Feldman]

Virginia residents are scrambling to purchase modern semiautomatic firearms before the state’s ban on so-called “assault weapons” takes effect, local media reported.

Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed the legislation banning the firearms on May 14, drawing immediate legal challenges from pro-Second Amendment organizations. Despite the uncertainty of whether the law would take effect, AR-15s and similar firearms that would be covered by the ban were flying off the shelves, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

“They’re buying the living daylights out of ARs,” Karen Ballengee, owner of Southern Police Equipment, told the paper. “They’re buying guns as fast as they can get their hands on them.”

Virginians are ‘buying the living daylights’ out of AR-15s and other soon-to-be illegal guns https://t.co/djmqQ6e0jd

— Richmond Times-Dispatch (@RTDNEWS) June 3, 2026

“Now that they know what’s happening, they’ve said, you know, we have the budget for it … let’s go get an extra,” retired law enforcement officer Tony Martin, general manager of New American Arms in Richmond, told the paper.

The FBI reported carrying out over 73,000 background checks on the National Instant Check System in Virginia during May, more than twice as many as the total conducted in May 2025.

In addition to the ban on so-called “assault weapons,” the bill Spanberger signed also outlaws standard-capacity magazines, setting an arbitrary limit of 15 rounds. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas observed in a footnote from his dissent in Carhart v. Stenberg that the term “assault weapons” is a politically-motivated euphemism used to mischaracterize semi-automatic firearms with features that give them a superficial similarity to firearms capable of fully-automatic operation in order to gain support for legislation restricting or banning them.

In an article published May 13, The New York Times noted that both the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle (which bears a resemblance to the M16 and M4 select-fire weapons used by the U.S. military) and semiautomatic rifles with cosmetic features or accessories that make them look like fully-automatic AK-47s are popular firearms owned by millions of civilians. Under the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and Bruen, firearms in common use for lawful purposes fall under the Second Amendment’s protection.