How Virginia’s Attempted Assault Weapon Ban Blew Up in Anti-Gunners’ Faces

Virginia rolled hard toward gun control this year. Never mind that Gov. Abigail Spanberger ran as a moderate, said little to nothing about guns during her campaign, said she was about affordability, and then took office and did nothing about the cost of living. Instead, she tried to redistrict the state–something she expressly said she wouldn’t do–and tried to take everyone’s guns away.

I was ready to hold onto Cam’s guns for him if he needed it, but thankfully, that hasn’t been necessary.

Part of the reason it’s not necessary is because of grandfather clauses thankfully, but another part is that everything Spanberger’s tried has blown up in her face spectacularly. Her redistricting plan got smacked down by the state Supreme Court, for example, and then we have her gun control efforts.

Let’s just say the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s Larry Keane isn’t exactly crying at the moment.

No one wants to be the “told you so” guy, but here we are. We told you so.

Virginia’s Gov. Abigail Spanberger and her gun control lackeys in the Assembly rushed through a half-cooked unconstitutional ban on the sale of Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) and other commonly owned firearms and standard capacity magazines. Once again, predictions of a rush to buy the guns Virginians (and the rest of America) want bore out. Background checks for the sale of a firearm in The Old Dominion shattered last year’s figures.

If Gov. Spanberger, and fellow Democrats who authored the law she signed, state Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim and Del. Dan Helmer, thought they were going to choke off MSR sales, they were wrong. They didn’t slow anything down. Instead, they juiced the sales, to the point that retailers in the state and Virginia State Police running the background checks couldn’t keep up with sales.

Truth in Numbers

June’s NSSF-Adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) figures are in and the totals are eye-popping. June closed out with a 241 percent increase in background checks, year-over year. There were 123,699 background checks completed in June. That’s 87,482 more than June 2025, when 36,217 background checks for the sale of a firearm were completed. That’s not all. There were 468,778 background checks completed in the first six months in Virginia for a gun sale this year. That’s 224,178 more than were conducted in the state during the same six months in 2025. That’s a 91 percent increase, year-over year.

NSSF predicted this surge in gun sales would happen. January’s background checks were 26 percent higher than the year before. February tallied a 55 percent increase over February 2025. March came in at 70 percent higher than the same month a year prior. April clocked in with a 78 percent increase over April 2025 and May topped 103 percent higher than a year before. Remember, multiple firearms can be purchased on the same background check, as long as they occur at the same time and location.

Gov. Spanberger did what only Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama were able to do before her. They managed to increase firearm sales because she wanted to ban them.

As it stands, a couple of judges have partially blocked enforcement of the state’s ban on so-called assault weapons, but with the Supreme Court set to hear a challenge to a similar ban next session, it’s unlikely that the long-term health of the state’s law is what anyone would call “good.”

I will disagree with Keane on one thing, though. Bill Clinton also sold a lot of guns because he wanted to ban them. The AR-15 and other so-called assault weapons were always available to gun buyers, but most people didn’t have a lot of interest in them. They sold, and sold well enough for companies to keep making them, but they weren’t all that popular either, from my recollection, with the gun-buying public as a whole.

Then the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban came along, and suddenly, people wanted the forbidden gun. They bought them in droves, then bought ban-legal variants for a decade, then switched back to the pre-ban configurations after the ban sunset.

During that time, the homicide rate continued to slide downward, starting before the ban and continuing through it and well afterward.

The guns are not the problem. They never were, despite the hysterics that surround them.

Virginia is just the latest state to try to ban them, but the truth is that they represent an absolute nothing in the grand scheme of things. If they were to go away tomorrow, we’d still have mass killings. As Virginia Tech proved, a couple of handguns can kill as many people, if not more, than an AR-15 can.

There are now more AR-15s and similar rifles in Virginia than there were before she and her cronies tried to ban them. This is the natural response to attempted tyranny. If the state doesn’t want you to have something, you’d best figure out the real reason why, and it’s rarely what they’re claiming it’s about.

And even if it is, we know how much nonsense they peddle when selling this to the public. They deserve to have this stuff blow up in their faces.

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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