The Department of Justice filed a new federal lawsuit against Virginia on July 1, 2026, and it deserves far more attention than a routine sequel to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon’s April warning letter. The case, United States v. Commonwealth of Virginia and Virginia Department of State Police, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia’s Richmond Division — the so-called rocket docket — under the signatures of Dhillon and Barry K. Arrington, Acting Chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section. It targets Virginia’s SB749, the law banning the purchase, sale, manufacture, and transfer of AR-15-style rifles that Governor Abigail Spanberger signed on May 14, 2026. What makes this filing significant is not simply that it exists. It is that the federal government just neutralized a procedural maneuver that could have quietly gutted the standing of every private Second Amendment plaintiff challenging the law.
The Standing Trap I’ve Been Watching
Here is my own read of the chessboard, not a claim drawn from the complaint itself: Virginia has been weighing delaying compliance with SB749’s purchase-and-sale ban out to the summer of 2027, even as the law’s nominal effective date arrived July 1, 2026. We already have a confirmed instance of exactly this kind of postponement elsewhere in Virginia’s assault-weapons package — the legislature pushed the statewide open-carry ban on assault-style weapons to July 1, 2027, citing drafting problems. My analysis is that a comparable delay applied to the purchase-and-sale ban would serve a second, unstated purpose. If a private plaintiff sues today claiming an urgent need to buy a rifle the law forbids, Virginia’s lawyers can respond that the ban will not bind anyone for another year, so there is no imminent injury and no need for an injunction. That argument can defeat standing and ripeness before a court ever reaches the Second Amendment merits.
A private civil rights organization or an individual gun owner has to establish concrete, imminent injury to get into federal court. A government plaintiff suing under a different statutory theory does not carry that same burden in the same way. That asymmetry is exactly why DOJ’s timing here matters.
A Different Toolkit for the Federal Government
DOJ did not sue as an ordinary Second Amendment plaintiff. It invoked 34 U.S.C. § 12601, the pattern-or-practice statute Congress enacted in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which lets the Attorney General sue a governmental authority in the United States’ own name to eliminate a pattern or practice that deprives persons of constitutional rights. That tool has historically targeted police departments accused of civil rights abuses. Here it is aimed at the Virginia Department of State Police, whose officers, the complaint alleges, have a statutory duty under Va. Code Ann. §§ 52-1 and 52-8 to enforce SB749’s criminal ban. Because DOJ is suing in the sovereign’s own name over a pattern of unconstitutional enforcement, Virginia’s delayed-compliance argument, effective against a private plaintiff’s individual injury, does not carry the same force against the government’s own institutional claim. Whatever Virginia’s timing strategy accomplishes against private litigants, it accomplishes far less against Washington.
What the Complaint Argues on the Merits
The complaint opens by invoking Virginia’s own constitutional pedigree, noting that James Madison, “the Father of the Constitution,” drafted the Bill of Rights, which took effect December 15, 1791, when Virginia became the eleventh state to ratify it. It then turns to the statute’s own language:
“The term ‘assault firearm’ is not a technical term used in the firearms industry. Rather, the term ‘assault weapon,’ and derivatives of that term, is a rhetorically charged political term developed by anti-gun publicists.”
— United States v. Commonwealth of Virginia, complaint
On the law, DOJ frames its claim under Bruen’s two-step framework while properly crediting Heller as the source of the actual historical work. The Supreme Court in Heller already established that only weapons “dangerous and unusual” may be banned, and that anything in common use for lawful purposes cannot be. That, not a re-litigation of history under Bruen, is the operative rule in any arms-ban case, and the complaint tracks it. It argues that the right to bear arms “requires a right to acquire arms,” just as free press protections presuppose a right to acquire a printing press, citing Drummond v. Robinson Township, 9 F.4th 217 (3d Cir. 2021), which Bruen itself cited approvingly for the proposition that bans on commercial firearm sales are untenable after Heller.
On common use, the complaint leans on Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600 (1994), which distinguished commonplace semiautomatic rifles from machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, and on Justice Kagan’s observation in Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 605 U.S. 280 (2025), that the AR-15 is “the most popular rifle in the country.” When a unanimous opinion authored by a justice with no sympathy for Second Amendment claims concedes that fact, the government’s burden to prove otherwise becomes very hard to carry.
Where This Is Headed
Justice Alito’s opinion for the Court in Wolford v. Lopez, decided June 25, 2026, refined how the plain-text inquiry gets framed, focusing on the effect of a law on the right to keep and bear arms rather than solely on the claimant’s conduct — a formulation close to the one I have argued for on this channel for years. That refinement will matter when the Supreme Court hears Viramontes v. Cook County, Illinois and Grant v. Higgins next term, deciding once and for all whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the AR-15. Virginia’s litigation strategy may have been clever. It was not clever enough to survive the Department of Justice.
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.