Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones filed a brief with the Supreme Court on Wednesday arguing that AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles should be treated as the legal equivalent of machine guns, and that they are not even “Arms” protected by the Second Amendment.
The filing supports Cook County, Illinois, in Viramontes v. Cook County, a case challenging the county’s ban on possessing or transferring so-called “assault weapons.” The Supreme Court is set to hear the challenge.
In the brief, Jones writes that “AR-15s bear nearly all the same features that take machineguns outside the Second Amendment’s protection,” and separately states that “AR-15s are machineguns, except that they — at least to start — have semiautomatic fire rather than automatic fire.”
Automatic and semiautomatic rifles are not the same thing under federal law or in basic mechanics. A machine gun, legally defined as a weapon that fires more than one shot automatically from a single pull of the trigger, requires no additional trigger pulls once firing begins. An AR-15 requires a separate trigger pull for every round fired. The military’s M16 fires roughly 800 rounds per minute; a base model AR-15 fires about 45 rounds per minute, a rate limited by how quickly one person can pull the trigger and how much ammunition is loaded.
Jones’s brief also claims that AR-15s have been restricted by states “since shortly after” they “became broadly available to American consumers.” Colt began selling the ArmaLite-designed semiautomatic rifle to the public in the 1960s. California did not pass the first state ban until 1989, and only seven states had bans in place by 2000. Jones cites 11 states and Washington, D.C. — representing more than 34 percent of the U.S. population — as currently restricting the rifles.
The brief further argues that “AR-15s are not ‘Arms’ that the Second Amendment protects” because they are “modern weapons of war that would have been wholly foreign to the framers of the Second Amendment,” despite the AR-15 never having been adopted as a standard military rifle.
That argument runs against existing Supreme Court precedent. In District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the claim “that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment” is “bordering on the frivolous,” adding, “We do not interpret constitutional rights that way.” In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Second Amendment’s “general definition covers modern instruments that facilitate armed self-defense,” even though the amendment’s definition of arms is fixed to its historical understanding.
Jones is not alone in making disputed claims in briefs filed in the case. Brady: United Against Gun Violence argued in its own filing that “AR-15 ownership is itself uncommon,” despite the rifles being among the best-selling firearms in the country.
Jones previously drew national attention after messages surfaced in which he said he wished then-state House Speaker Todd Gilbert would feel pain “like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence.”
