Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones filed a Supreme Court brief backing Cook County Illinois bans on possessing and transferring AR-15s and similar semiautomatic firearms ahead of a challenge the justices will hear. Jones says those rifles share nearly all traits that put machine guns outside Second Amendment protection and cites limits in eleven states plus the District of Columbia covering over 34 percent of Americans.

He claimed states restricted them soon after they became widely available, yet Colt sold the ArmaLite rifle to consumers in the 1960s and California moved in 1989. Jones stated AR-15s are machine guns except they start with semiautomatic rather than automatic fire, while automatic guns shoot continuously and semiautomatics require a separate trigger pull for each round depending on speed and magazine size.