Virginia AG: AR-15s Are Really Just Machine Guns That Shoot Semi-Automatically…Or Something

[Virginia AG Jay] 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.

— Jordan Boyd in Virginia AG: ‘AR-15s Are Machine Guns Except That They’ Are Not