Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones, who fantasized about murdering his political opponent and wishing death upon the man’s children, thinks the most popular semiautomatic rifle on the market is the same thing as a machine gun.
Jones made his remarkable ignorance on guns and the Second Amendment known on Wednesday in the form of a brief to the Supreme Court, which is slated to weigh a challenge to an Illinois county’s ban on the possession and transfer of so-called “assault weapons”: AR-15s and similar semiautomatic firearms. In the document filed in support of Cook County’s firearm prohibitions, Jones argues that “AR-15s bear nearly all the same features that take machineguns outside the Second Amendment’s protection.”
He kicks off the brief by lying that AR-15s were restricted by states “since shortly after” they “became broadly available to American consumers.” Colt began selling ArmaLite’s semiautomatic rifle to Americans in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 1989 that California sought to interfere in those transfers.
Jones also points to AR-15 restrictions in “11 states and the District of Columbia — collectively representing over 34 percent of the United States’ population” as proof that states like his can and should be allowed to dictate Americans’ Second Amendment right to own semiautomatic rifles.
“AR-15s are machineguns, except that they — at least to start — have semiautomatic fire rather than automatic fire,” Jones also writes.
There are significant legal and physical distinctions between automatic firearms and semiautomatic rifles. Most notably, and as the name suggests, automatic rifles or “machine guns” fire continuous rounds. Semiautomatic rifles, however, require an individual trigger pull to fire each round. That means the number of rounds fired depends on how fast one person can pull an AR-15 trigger and how many rounds are loaded in their magazine.
For context, M16s, the standard-issue automatic rifles of the U.S. military, fire 800 rounds per minute. Base model AR-15s only fire 45 rounds per minute. Even semiautomatic rifles that are modified with bump stocks and forced reset triggers, which Jones asserts “convert AR-15s to unprotected machine guns or their functional equivalent,” can only fire roughly 400 rounds minute, a number that varies substantially based on a shooter’s skill.
Legally, machine guns are defined as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” These automatic guns are heavily regulated, often low stock and cost-prohibitive, and require special paperwork and permissions for transfer to a private citizen, a process only possible if the machine gun was lawfully registered pre-May 19, 1986.
It doesn’t take long for Jones’ brief to devolve into full constitutional illiteracy.
“AR-15s are not ‘Arms’ that the Second Amendment protects,” Jones writes.
The AR-15 was never a military rifle, yet the Democrat also argues that AR-15 are “modern weapons of war that would have been wholly foreign to the framers of the Second Amendment.”
Supreme Court precedent says otherwise. In District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia said claims “that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment” were “bordering on the frivolous.”
“We do not interpret constitutional rights that way,” Scalia added.
Similarly in the high bench’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision, majority opinion author Justice Clarence Thomas declared that “even though the Second Amendment’s definition of ‘arms’ is fixed according to its historical understanding, that general definition covers modern instruments that facilitate armed self-defense.”
Jones isn’t the only one filing briefs littered with falsities about ARs. Brady: United Against Gun Violence claimed in its Viramontes brief that “AR-15 ownership is itself uncommon,” even though the semiautomatic rifles are widely considered some of the most common, bestselling, and most effective self-defense guns in the nation. In another brief, self-proclaimed “marketing experts” pretended that the popularity of AR-15s is “dangerous fiction.”
Democrats and their cronies in the corporate media are notorious for deceiving Americans about their Second Amendment rights. They recycle tired talking points about AR-15s, shame firearm makers, and mock gun freedom laws. Jones — who once wished his political opponent, then-state House Speaker Todd Gilbert, would feel pain “like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence” — proves in his Viramontes v. Cook County brief that his words are no exception.
