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.
— Stephen Gutowski in Virginia’s ‘assault firearms’ ban could be backfiring