Virginia’s Democrat AG Jay Jones: AR-15s Are Semiautomatic Machine Guns

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.”

WATCH: 

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.