The United States Department of Justice has filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against the government of the Virgin Islands, seeking to block a newly enacted ban on AR-15-style rifles and magazines holding more than fifteen rounds. The motion, filed inside DOJ’s existing civil-rights suit against the territory, rests on a single overwhelming fact: the controlling federal appellate court for the Virgin Islands just struck down a nearly identical law in New Jersey. This is not a new lawsuit. It is a supplemental motion inside United States v. Government of the Virgin Islands, the pattern-or-practice case DOJ filed on December 16, 2025, under 34 U.S.C. § 12601, which originally challenged the territory’s discretionary “proper reason” carry-permit scheme. DOJ has now added Act 9113 to that same case, and it is going to lose badly.
An Anti-Gun Jurisdiction Walks Into Its Own Circuit’s Buzzsaw
I have made this argument for years, and the Virgin Islands just proved it again: the most reliable source of favorable Second Amendment precedent is an anti-gun jurisdiction that overreaches. The District of Columbia’s total handgun ban gave us District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). Chicago’s handgun ban gave us McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010). Massachusetts’s stun-gun ban, applied even against domestic-violence victims like Jaime Caetano, gave us Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U.S. 411 (2016). New York’s discretionary carry regime gave us New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). And Hawaii’s default rule barring armed carry on private property open to the public gave us this year’s Wolford v. Lopez, 609 U.S. ___ (2026).
Now add the Virgin Islands to that list. On June 24, 2026, Governor Albert Bryan Jr. signed Act 9113 into law, banning semi-automatic rifles and magazines over fifteen rounds. He did it barely three weeks before the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — which has appellate jurisdiction over the District Court of the Virgin Islands, alongside Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware — ruled en banc in Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Attorney General New Jersey, No. 24-2415 (3d Cir. July 17, 2026), consolidated with Cheeseman v. Davenport, that bans on semi-automatic rifles and magazines over ten rounds violate the Second Amendment. The Virgin Islands enacted a law more restrictive than the one its own circuit had just condemned.
What Act 9113 Actually Does
DOJ’s motion is direct about the mechanism. As the filing states, the law “bans possession, receipt, purchase, sale, import, or transfer of magazines that can hold more than 15 rounds,” and “no firearm in the U.S. Virgin Islands may contain a magazine of 15 rounds or greater.” Because AR-15s and comparable rifles are manufactured to accept standard 20- or 30-round magazines, the fifteen-round cap functions as a ban on the rifle itself. DOJ’s motion draws the conclusion the Third Circuit already reached, describing the new provisions as “glaringly unconstitutional” in light of ANJRPC — a precedent that, in the motion’s words, “squarely holds that this is unconstitutional.”
The Right to Acquire Is Inseparable From the Right to Keep and Bear
Act 9113 goes further than New Jersey’s law in one respect — it also bars owners of firearms manufactured to hold more than fifteen rounds from selling or transferring them. DOJ’s motion identifies this as an independent constitutional defect: “The restriction on the private purchase, sale, or other transfer of constitutionally protected arms is itself unconstitutional.” I have made this point before, and it is simple logic. The right to bear arms presupposes the right to acquire arms, just as the right to a free press presupposes the right to acquire a printing press, and the right to freely practice religion presupposes the right to acquire a sacred text. You cannot keep a weapon, and you cannot carry it for self-defense, if the government forbids you from ever obtaining it in the first place.
Brick by Brick, the Wall Keeps Rising
In the motion itself, DOJ asks the district court to take up the request at the hearing already scheduled in the case for August 19, 2026, and I expect the court to enter an injunction citing directly to ANJRPC. That ruling will become its own precedent — one more brick that future courts can cite alongside the Third Circuit’s decision when the next AR-15 or magazine ban comes before them. This is how constitutional litigation actually advances: not in a single sweeping stroke, but case by case, circuit by circuit, until the record becomes unanswerable. The Supreme Court has already granted certiorari in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, and I expect argument this term with a decision by June 2027 that could resolve the AR-15 question nationwide. Until then, every jurisdiction still clinging to a semi-automatic rifle ban should look at what just happened in the Virgin Islands and understand precisely what is coming for their own statute books.
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.