Virginia's Dem AG Calls AR-15 Rifles 'Machine Guns' in Stunningly Ignorant Brief to SCOTUS
Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones, the same Democrat who famously wished death on a Republican opponent and his children four years ago, has since come out as an ignoramus who knows nothing about guns.
Jones unveiled his ignorance in an amicus brief filed on Wednesday with the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to rule soon on whether an Illinois county was legally justified in banning all so-called “assault weapons.”
In the brief, Jones admitted that he thinks AR-15s, which are a typical of semiautomatic rifle, are basically the same thing as machine guns.
“AR-15s are machineguns, except that they — at least to start — have semiautomatic fire rather than automatic fire,” the brief read.
“AR-15s thus bear nearly all the same features that take machineguns outside the Second Amendment’s protection,” the stunning brief continued.
Jones was dead wrong, according to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
“AR-15s are machineguns, except that they have semiautomatic fire rather than automatic fire.”
Read that again.
Someone actually wrote this, presumably proofread it, and decided it belonged in a legal brief to the Supreme Court.
Incredible.
— Gun Owners of CA (@GunOwnersCA) October 28, 2026
While writing an opinion in 2024 striking down the federal bump stock ban, Justice Thomas clearly delineated the difference between the two types of guns.
“Congress has long restricted access to ‘machinegun[s],’ a category of firearms defined by the ability to ‘shoot, automatically more than one shot… by a single function of the trigger,’” he wrote in the case Garland v. Cargill.
“Semiautomatic firearms, which require shooters to reengage the trigger for every shot, are not machineguns,” he added.
Jones would have you believe otherwise because he wants to ban civilians from owning AR-15s.
“AR-15s are not ‘Arms’ that the Second Amendment protects,” he bluntly wrote in his brief.
“A state may therefore choose to restrict its citizens’ ability to possess such weapons,” he added.
Jones even tried to weave history into his poorly conceived argument.
“No number of present-day purchases can change the fact that AR-15s are nothing like ‘the sorts of weapons’ in use in the late 18th century,” he wrote. “In the Founding era, 50 to 60 percent of households owned a firearm, typically a single-shot, muzzle-loading long gun.”
“AR-15s, by contrast, are modern weapons of war that would have been wholly foreign to the framers of the Second Amendment,” he added.
He was wrong again, this time according to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (and with a hat tip to The Federalist).
In District of Columbia v. Heller, Scalia described the argument from the left “that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment” as “bordering on the frivolous.”
Nice try though, Jones.
So what is this all about anyway?
According to the Oyez Project, an online database launched by the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois’ Cook County at one point instituted a law “banning the possession, sale, and transfer of what it labels assault weapons.”
To be clear, there is no such thing as an “assault weapon.” It’s a term made up by the ignorant left to describe any weapon that essentially scares them.
What Cook County’s law actually does is ban “more than 100 specifically named semiautomatic rifles, including AR-15 and AK-47 platform rifles,” according to the Oyez Project.
It also bans “any semiautomatic rifle that can accept a magazine holding more than ten rounds of ammunition and has at least one of several listed physical features, such as a folding stock, a pistol grip, or a barrel shroud.”
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In response to the ban, two residents, Cutberto Viramontes and Christopher Khaya, filed suit.
The high court is now scheduled to hear arguments in Viramontes v. Cook County on Dec. 2. In advance of the hearing, shameless Democrats like Jones have been filing briefs in favor of Cook County.
FPC LEGAL UPDATE: Break out those anti-gun argument Bingo cards, because Connecticut and Cook County have just filed their Supreme Court briefs in our Viramontes lawsuit against “assault weapon” bans. https://t.co/XgJYe8Y5pv https://t.co/u2GIl37E7o
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) October 21, 2026
Do these Democrats really want someone like Jones siding with them? This is the same guy who famously sent a Republican legislator and friend horrifying text messages in 2022.
In the texts, he “speculated about who he’d shoot if given the chance, wished that one of [then-Virginia state] House Speaker Todd Gilbert’s children would die to make the Republican reconsider his position on guns, and then said that Gilbert and his wife were ‘breeding little fascists,’” according to Cardinal News.
Sheesh…
But I’ll give Jones credit: After hearing his arguments, I have personally reconsidered my position on guns and decided that some people are indeed too crazy to own them — namely people like him!
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