We’re about three weeks away from Virginia’s ban on “assault firearms” and “large capacity” magazines taking effect, and gun shops across the Old Dominion are continuing to see booming business as customers look to stock up on the guns and magazines that will have to be pulled from store shelves unless the law is enjoined from being enforced by an injunction.
According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, gun sales in Virginia last month were about double what they were in May, 2025. That’s right in line with what Steve’s Archery and Guns owner Steve Rodgers has been seeing at his shop in Shenandoah.
RODGERS: The people that are writing these bills don’t even know the working parts of a gun. They keep saying “assault rifle.” Well, in all my 11 distributors that I deal with, with probably hundreds of thousands of guns, there’s not one gun that’s listed as an “assault rifle.” … I guess you can take a two-by-four and that would be an “assault” two-by-four. … This shotgun right here is actually, it’s used for turkey hunting. So, because it has that type of grip on it like that, they consider that an assault rifle, or an assault shotgun.
Rodgers’ shop is in one of a dozen or so Virginia counties where prosecutors and sheriffs have called this new law unconstitutional. Page County Commonwealth’s Attorney and Marine Corps veteran Chapman Good wrote a letter opposing the ban which circulated on social media. He said hunting and gun ownership are a way of life in the valley.
Kudos to WMRA reporter Randi Hagi for doing a good job of presenting the views of pro-Second Amendment folks like Rodgers and Good alongside those of anti-gun activists like Lori Haas.
GOOD: The Supreme Court was clear in Miller, all the way back in 1939, that common-use firearms cannot be restricted in this way. The estimates that I saw are that there are more than 30 million AR-15s in the United States. That seems like pretty common use to me.
He also points to Virginia law, which outlines a state militia consisting of all able-bodied citizens between 16 and 55 years of age who could be called into service by the governor.
I asked him about the argument that guns with high-capacity magazines in the hands of private citizens enable mass shootings.
GOOD: I have a difficult time accepting the fact that some people misuse something, therefore, other people should not be able to use it. I think that is a poor way to govern. People get drunk and drive all the time. It’s a constant issue of public safety that every community deals with. But we don’t take away alcohol and we don’t take away vehicles, right? We just make it illegal and we arrest those people.
Virginia Democrats are working to set up a retail market for marijuana right now, even though there’s plenty of evidence that legalization has led to an increase in traffic deaths. Some have even claimed a link between marijuana use and mass shootings, but Democrats aren’t trying to ban the devil’s lettuce as a result.
Outliers like Washington, D.C. and Chicago tried to ban handguns in the hopes of reducing violent crime, but those bans were abject failures in addition to being outright infringements on our Second Amendment rights. So-called assault weapons are used far less frequently in violent crimes than handguns, but as Good notes, they’re commonly used for lawful purposes by millions of Americans. A ban on these firearms won’t have a significant impact on the violent crime rate, which is already below the national average and trending down in Virginia even without a ban in place… and with gun sales (including purchases of AR-15s and other soon-to-be-prohibited firearms) booming across the state for several months now.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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