Back in 2019, David Harsanyi penned an article titled, If You’re Trying To Ban Guns, The Least You Can Do Is Learn The Basics, which focused on complaints of “gunsplaining” by gun control advocates objecting to how their Second Amendment opponents undermined their arguments by pointing out the “constant glaring technical and policy ‘faux pas’ of gun controllers.”
The impetus was a Washington Post op-ed (The NRA and its allies use jargon to bully gun-control supporters) which acknowledged that gun control advocates “bandied the phrase ‘assault weapon’ around as if it were a static category of insidious killers” and “defined an assault weapon, in law, by its cosmetic add-ons — pistol grips, collapsible stocks, bayonet lugs — while overstating the role these weapons play in overall gun crime in America,” but slammed “gunsplaining” as a bad-faith tactic that “further[ed] a group identity of firearms owners as beset by a dumb or dishonest adversary, to flatter their insecurities and tell them they don’t need to take gun controllers seriously because you can’t reason with ignorance.”
For his part, Harsanyi was amazed that a major newspaper would actually publish an op-ed not only “justifying public ignorance on public policy” but arguing “that facts only help smother discourse rather than enhance it” and condemning the insistence on factual accuracy as unfair intimidation, especially because so much of the gun-control narrative is being “driven by the mechanics of a firearm.”
Moreover, Harsanyi argued, it is gun control proponents who resort to “jargon-y sounding words in efforts to fearmonger viewers and constituents,” pointing to examples like “full semi-automatic” and “high capacity, rapid-fire magazines.” Former President Joe Biden was the foremost offender in this genre, with his claim that stabilizing braces on pistols “[m]akes them where you can have … a higher caliber bullet – coming out of that gun,” reference to “a magazine with 100 clips in it,” or that “the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun” (at least then Biden didn’t call it an “AR-14”).
According to Harsanyi, the failure to respect or even understand the differences between a semi-automatic and automatic firearm is an indicator that the person is “dishonest, unserious or unprepared for the debate.”
Which brings us to an amicus brief filed by Jay Jones (D), Virginia’s Attorney General.
Jones filed the brief on behalf of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States Supreme Court case of Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, in which the Court will decide “whether the Second and 14th Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.”
His brief urges the Court to uphold bans on the purchase and sale of “assault firearms,” like the recently enacted (and immediately challenged by the NRA) Virginia law, Va. Code § 18.2-287.4:1 on “assault firearms.”
There’s certainly plenty to pick apart in this 26-page document. But we’ll focus on the brief’s central claim that “AR-15s are not ‘Arms’ that the Second Amendment protects” because “AR-15s are machineguns, except that they—at least to start—have semiautomatic fire rather than automatic fire. AR-15s thus bear nearly all the same features that take machineguns outside the Second Amendment’s protection.” (Emphasis in original.)
AR-15s, it alleges, “are exceedingly similar to unprotected machineguns,” and the brief relies heavily on references to bump-stocks, auto-sears, forced reset triggers and binary triggers to build the argument that AR-15s are really incipient machineguns; the Court (and the rest of us) are to believe that they are a kind of automatic firearm-in-waiting. The brief further asserts that the fact “end users would have to take some simple steps to turn their AR-15s into machineguns does not change the calculus” because “AR-15s are not meaningfully less dangerous than machineguns” regardless of whether these necessary modifications are made (emphasis added). Accordingly, “the Second Amendment does not prevent states from restricting AR-15s, just as with their fraternal twin, the machinegun.”
In a final ironic touch, the Jones brief concludes that “[j]udicially created tests should make some common sense.”
What we have here is a PETA-analogous argument of “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”
It’s not too surprising that no other entity has signed onto the Jones brief. It ignores or glosses over the specific, fundamental and critical differences between automatic and semiautomatic firearms. These differences aren’t a matter of opinion: practically, factually and legally there is a sharp and clear line between the two, however loudly the gun control camp denounces AR-15s as “assault weapons” and (yet another sloppy and meaningless term) “weapons of war.” Applying the Jones brief’s line of reasoning, there is no limit on what falls outside the scope of the Second Amendment, meaning not just AR-15s but other semiautomatic firearms are just like machineguns and could or should be regulated as strictly.
For reference, David B. Kopel (who, incidentally, co-authored the NRA’s amicus brief in Viramontes) has exhaustively discredited the myth of the AR-15 as a machinegun-equivalent firearm and the “supposed historical tradition of banning what the government calls ‘unusually dangerous’ arms.” Unlike machine guns, semiautomatic firearms generally (including supposed “assault weapons”) “fire at essentially the same rate as semiautomatic handguns” (only one round for each pull of the trigger) and there is no factual basis to support claims of “excessive lethality” ascribed to such “assault weapons” (e.g., AR bullets “will destroy all the organs in the region of where they’re traveling” and “will blow a huge hole in a human being, particularly the exit wound, and it’ll almost always be lethal”).
Our readers can decide for themselves whether the brief reveals Attorney General Jay Jones to be “dishonest, unserious or unprepared for the debate.” Gunsplaining aside, Jones is arguably far from the ideal person to preach on the “dangerousness” and “tremendous lethality” of any guns, given his earlier communications fantasizing about “putting two bullets to the head” of a rival politician and wishing his children (“little fascists”) dead.
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