Virginia’s legislature is moving fast to strip gun owners of magazines holding more than 10 rounds — no grandfather clause, no grace period, just an overnight conversion of millions of law-abiding Virginians into misdemeanor criminals. And the Trump administration’s Department of Justice just weighed in with a short, sharp response that every Second Amendment supporter should hear.
What Virginia Is Actually Doing
Senate Bill 749 and its House companion HB217 represent the new progressive majority under Governor Abigail Spanberger doing exactly what it promised. The substitute version of SB749 removes any grandfather clause for existing magazine owners. Keeping a magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds becomes a Class 1 misdemeanor — up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine. Millions of Virginians own standard 30-round AR-15 magazines and double-stack handgun magazines that ship from the factory at 15, 17, or even 21 rounds. Under SB749, they are criminals on day one.
Cam Edwards at Bearing Arms flagged the removal of the grandfather clause on X, and it immediately drew a response from Harmeet K. Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General heading the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and its newly created Second Amendment Section. Her reply was brief and unambiguous: “This is a blatant violation of Supreme Court precedent and it will not stand.”
She’s right. And here’s why.
A Magazine Ban Is a Firearms Ban
My position — which I have been hammering at the Four Boxes Diner for years — is that a ban on standard-capacity magazines is not merely a restriction on an accessory. It is a categorical ban on an entire class of firearms: those capable of firing more than 10 rounds without manual reloading. That covers the overwhelming majority of modern semi-automatic pistols and rifles on the American market.
Under District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), the government cannot categorically ban arms that are in common use by Americans for lawful purposes. Heller defines an “arm” to include instruments that facilitate armed self-defense — and a magazine is exactly that. A pistol without its magazine is a paperweight. Strip the magazine, and you have not regulated an accessory; you have disabled the firearm. That is a categorical ban.
Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), the burden at the historical-tradition stage of the analysis falls on the government — not on the rights claimant. The government must affirmatively show that the arm it seeks to restrict is dangerous and unusual. Both elements are required. If an arm is not unusual — and tens of millions of Americans owning standard-capacity magazines makes them decidedly not unusual — the government cannot satisfy the conjunctive test. Anti-gun courts routinely flip that burden onto the rights claimant, and that is wrong. The Supreme Court will not make that error when the AR-15 ban cases arrive.
The DOJ Is Already Walking the Walk
Dhillon’s public statement is not just rhetoric. The Trump DOJ has already filed amicus briefs taking precisely this position in active litigation. In Barnett v. Raoul, No. 23-1825 (7th Cir.), the DOJ argued in June 2025 that Illinois’s ban on semiautomatic rifles and standard-capacity magazines is unconstitutional. In Cheeseman v. Platkin, No. 23-1900 (3d Cir.), the DOJ filed a brief in September 2025 making the same argument against New Jersey’s assault-firearms and large-capacity magazine ban.
The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office under Jeanine Pirro has gone further still: it has formally announced it will not prosecute violations of the District’s 10-round magazine cap, concluding that the law “cannot be reconciled with the Second Amendment.” As an NRA article summarized it, that ban “arbitrarily limits the capacity of a firearm magazine to 10 rounds or fewer, which is well below the factory specified capacity for many common handguns.” That is a straightforward application of Heller and Bruen, nothing more.
What Comes Next
Will Dhillon’s statement stop Virginia? Probably not in the short run. The Spanberger administration has the votes and the ideological motivation to push this through regardless of DOJ warnings. But the legal exposure is real, and the Trump DOJ has now made clear it views these laws as targets.
The bigger picture is the Supreme Court docket. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s statement in Snope v. Brown, 605 U.S. ___ (2025) — noting that SCOTUS “should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two” — signals that the categorical question is coming. Once the Court takes an AR-15 ban case and resolves it, magazine bans collapse with it because the logic is identical. My read is that case lands in the 2026–2027 term.
The trend in Virginia is ugly right now. But the federal legal architecture is moving in exactly the right direction, and the DOJ is finally using its institutional weight to say so out loud.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.