Stephen Gutowski is the founder of the Reload.
Virginia Democrats took a shot at restricting AR-style rifles this year, but the move appears to have backfired.
On May 14, Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) signed an “assault firearms” ban following a party-line vote in March. The law prohibits the sale or transfer of any semiautomatic center-fire rifles that are capable of accepting detachable magazines and have certain ergonomic or cosmetic features, such as pistol grips and telescoping stocks. The legislation primarily targets rifles but also affects semiautomatic pistols and shotguns.
Anyone convicted of violating the law faces a penalty of up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine, and is banned from purchasing, possessing or transporting any firearm in Virginia for three years.
For a short time, the statute seemed to be succeeding. By July 1, when the law took effect, the targeted guns were gone from stores statewide. Background check data soon showed, however, that the legislation appeared to have had the unintended, if unsurprising, effect of spiking sales before it went into effect.
In June, the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) reported a remarkable increase in reviews for long gun sales, which include rifles and shotguns. The vetting system — an imperfect but reliable gauge for sales — saw a single-month record in Virginia and more than three times the number of checks during the same period in 2025. The state saw 43,553 NICS long gun checks last month, more than any other state, despite being the 12th most populous.
That, moreover, was just the culmination of a months long sales surge, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Its analysis showed that NICS checks on gun sales were up 26 percent year-over-year in January. The number jumped to 55 percent in February, 70 percent in March and 78 percent in April, before surging to more than 100 percent in May.
As July 1 approached, gun-rights groups sounded the alarm. Gun Owners of America posted about the pending restrictions to their more than 400,000 followers on X. The Virginia Citizens Defense League pushed Virginians to buy the soon-to-be-banned guns.
Some sellers said that fear of a ban motivated customers to buy AR-style rifles for the first time. “In fact, we’ve seen today more first-time buyers, I mean, of course, over the past three to four weeks, but even today we’ve had a number of people who have come in for first-time buying,” Mark Tosh, manager of Town Gun Shop of Richmond, told WTVR in June. “They’re like, ‘This is my first time, can you show me how you know about ARs, and what can I get, and what do you have available?’” Another retailer in Northern Virginia reportedly sold more than 1,000 of the rifles during the last weekend of June.
All told, then, there are probably tens of thousands more “assault firearms” in civilian hands throughout the Old Dominion than before the law was passed.
The irony: The ban is unlikely to last anyway. The day before the law went into effect, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Viramontes v. Cook County, a consolidated case focused on two other bans targeting AR-15s and similar guns. The court’s ruling will determine whether Virginia’s legislation stands.
It looks like bad news for Richmond. Half a dozen similarly credentialed experts from varying viewpoints recently told me they expect the ban to be struck down. The Supreme Court will deliver its judgment in Viramontes by next July. But Virginia’s law might not stay intact for that long.
State-level gun-rights challenges have already started to bite. By the time the law went into effect, two state judges had issued injunctions against enforcement by the state police and some local prosecutors. A Virginia judge clarified on July 7 that one of those injunctions barred all state officials from enforcing the law.
Attorney General Jay Jones (D) vowed to appeal the injunctions and the ban could snap back at any time if a higher court overturns the injunctions or issues a stay. But, for now, the rifles are already back on the shelves of many Virginia gun stores.
Whether the Virginia state courts doom the ban in the next few months or the Supreme Court does so in the next year, the outcome seems fairly clear. Rather than taking AR-style rifles out of gun stores, Virginia lawmakers may have helped fuel the largest spike in gun sales in state history.
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