Virginia’s latest filing in Crump v. Katz is more than courtroom gamesmanship—it’s a deliberate attempt to erase the individual-rights reading of its own constitution that the state’s highest court quietly embraced in 2021. By arguing that Article I, Section 13 only protects a “well-regulated militia” and not an ordinary citizen’s right to keep and bear arms, Richmond is inviting the judiciary to treat the state’s gun owners as second-class constitutional stakeholders whose liberties can be dialed up or down by legislative whim. That stance collides head-on with both the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen framework and the textual command of Virginia’s 1971 constitution, which deliberately added the phrase “the right of the people” precisely to mirror the federal Second Amendment.

If the trial court accepts the state’s reading, the ripple effects will be immediate and severe: every “may-issue” restriction, every magazine limit, and every sensitive-place designation now on the books could be insulated from meaningful judicial scrutiny. More troubling, a loss here would hand anti-gun attorneys in other states a ready-made template for gutting analogous provisions in their own charters. Conversely, a decisive win would not only reaffirm Virginia as a shall-issue sanctuary but also supply persuasive authority for the growing number of state courts being asked to apply Bruen-style history-and-tradition tests to their own constitutions.

For the 2A community the takeaway is straightforward—state constitutions are no longer safe harbors; they are active battlegrounds where the same textual and historical arguments that prevailed in Bruen must be redeployed with equal vigor. Virginia’s gun owners cannot assume that a favorable federal precedent will automatically protect them at home; eternal vigilance, paired with relentless litigation, remains the price of retaining the individual right the Founders enshrined and the Commonwealth once promised to defend.