Trump's DOJ to USVI: Your AR-15 Ban Is Illegal — Back Down
DOJ formally invokes Cheeseman to kill the Virgin Islands' rifle and magazine ban — and the playbook works everywhere.
- DOJ formally invoked Third Circuit Cheeseman precedent against a non-NJ jurisdiction for the first time, extending its reach beyond the circuit's original targets.
- USVI Act 9113 — which bans AR-15s by name and criminalizes standard-capacity magazines — now faces federal government opposition on top of existing GOA litigation.
- A DOJ win here creates a replicable template: federal intervention against unconstitutional arms bans in territories and states that refuse to comply with circuit court rulings.
- Gun owners and 2A organizations now have a federal filing on record arguing standard-capacity magazines are constitutionally protected — usable in future litigation nationwide.
The U.S. Department of Justice has moved to block USVI Act 9113 — a law that bans AR-15 rifles by name and criminalizes possession of the magazines those rifles require to function. DOJ's message to the territory: the Third Circuit's Cheeseman ruling already settled this. Common arms in common use are protected. Full stop.
This is the same Third Circuit precedent that killed New Jersey's AR ban last month — forcing NJ State Police to notify every licensed dealer the law was dead by July 31. The Virgin Islands apparently thought Cheeseman was someone else's problem. DOJ just corrected that assumption in writing.
Act 9113 runs the same playbook every anti-gun legislature runs: dress up a ban on standard rifles and magazines in language about "assault weapons" and "high-capacity" to make confiscation sound palatable. DOJ translated that language back into plain English — you criminalized arms the Constitution protects, and Cheeseman says so explicitly.
The territory already faces GOA in federal court over a separate carry-licensing scheme that exposes law-abiding American visitors to a ten-year mandatory minimum for carrying a firearm. Now USVI has the federal government itself pushing back on its gun laws from two directions at once.
The implications extend well past the Caribbean. DOJ formally aligning with Cheeseman on standard-capacity magazines gives that precedent harder teeth everywhere it applies — and signals that the federal government is no longer a silent partner while territories and states run unconstitutional firearms bans.
Watch this docket. If DOJ's intervention forces USVI to stand down, it creates a direct template for challenging identical bans in every other jurisdiction that thought Cheeseman applied to someone else.
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