Virginia Just Told a Court You Have No Individual Gun Rights

This isn't a leaked memo or a radical law-review fantasy. It is Virginia's official, live, on-the-record legal position in active litigation over its firearm and magazine ban.

The theory has a name: the "collective right." The Supreme Court killed it in 2008. In *Heller*, SCOTUS ruled — plainly, directly, no wiggle room — that the individual right to keep and bear arms does not depend on militia service. Case closed.

**Virginia is running it back anyway.**

Richmond's lawyers are arguing the state constitution's right to bear arms is militia-tied, and therefore does not protect ordinary Virginians who own AR-style rifles or standard-capacity magazines. Translated out of lawyer-speak: your rights exist only when the government needs you to fight for it. The moment you're no longer useful to the state, hand them over.

This isn't happening in a vacuum. Virginia already ate two federal injunctions that gutted its ban. AG Jay Jones already retreated from federal court. So now Richmond is hunting for a state-law lane — a parallel track where federal Second Amendment protections supposedly can't reach.

The play is calculated and it is dangerous.

If Virginia gets any traction here, California, Illinois, New Jersey, and every other blue-state AG defending a magazine ban or so-called assault-weapon ban copies the blueprint by morning. Their lawyers are monitoring this case right now. The entire point is to argue that *Heller* only controls the federal constitutional right, then use state constitutional language to wall off gun bans from federal review — engineering a two-track system where states nullify your Second Amendment rights from the inside.

**They're not trying to beat Heller. They're trying to go around it.**

The tools to demolish this exist. *Bruen* (2022) and *Rahimi* (2024) give Second Amendment litigators everything they need to torch this kind of historical revisionism on the record. The militia-only theory has no honest footing in the text, history, or tradition of American gun rights — and any court that entertains it deserves a loud, public reversal.

FPC, SAF, and Virginia's own VCDL are already in this fight. Watch them closely.

Because Virginia isn't just defending a gun ban anymore. It's trying to resurrect a dead constitutional theory that converts your right to bear arms into a revocable government privilege — one the state can claw back the moment it decides you're no longer the kind of militia it wants.

This case doesn't end in Richmond. It ends at a precedent that either holds the line or hands every anti-gun AG in America a loaded weapon against your rights.