In a brief filed to the Supreme Court of the United States in support of “assault weapons” bans, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones claimed AR-15s are machine guns even though they do not shoot in full automatic like machine guns do.
The Federalist noted that Jones filed his brief to SCOTUS on Wednesday, wherein he wrote, “AR-15s bear nearly all the same features that take machine guns outside the Second Amendment’s protection.”
He also claimed, “AR-15s are machineguns, except that they — at least to start — have semiautomatic fire rather than automatic fire.”
Gun Owners of California commented in an X post on Jones’ filing, writing, “’AR-15s are machineguns, except that they…have semiautomatic fire rather than automatic fire.’ Read that again. Someone actually wrote this, presumably proofread it, and decided it belonged in a legal brief to the Supreme Court. Incredible.”
Jones’ suggestion that AR-15s are semiautomatic machine guns flies in the face of SCOTUS’s June 14, 2024, ruling which struck down the bump stock ban. In that ruling, Clarence Thomas opened the majority opinion by observing: “Congress has long restricted access to ‘machineguns,’ a category of firearms defined by the ability to ‘shoot, automatically more than one shot . . . by a single function of the trigger.’ Semiautomatic firearms, which require shooters to reengage the trigger for every shot, are not machineguns.”
