(DCNF)—Former Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli explained to the Daily Caller News Foundation why he chose to use a state constitutional provision that invoked the militia to challenge his state’s ban on modern semiautomatic firearms.
Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed the ban on so-called “assault weapons,” SB 749, into law on May 14, drawing immediate suits from pro-Second Amendment organizations, including the National Rifle Association (NRA), Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC). SAF also backed a separate suit by Cuccinelli, who used the militia clause of the state constitution’s right to bear arms provision to challenge the ban in what he called a “case of first impression” in oral arguments before a Spotsylvania County judge Wednesday.
“That means no one has had a legal dispute that will turn on the questions that this case will turn on before,” Cuccinelli explained to the DCNF in a phone interview shortly after the hearing. “And the main question is, ‘Does the militia clause of Article 1, Section 13 protect the rights of individual Virginians to buy, sell, own, shoot, practice with, et cetera, firearms?’”
Article 1, Section 13 of Virginia’s constitution says, “That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”
Cuccinelli explained why the state-level challenge was important, even as other litigation challenging the Spanberger semi-auto ban has cited United States Supreme Court decisions, including Heller v. District of Columbia (which struck down Washington, D.C.’s ban on handguns on Second Amendment grounds), McDonald v. Chicago (which invalidated Chicago’s ban on handguns on Second and Fourteenth Amendment grounds) and New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (which threw out New York’s “good cause” requirement for concealed carry permits on Second Amendment grounds).
“All of the Second Amendment case law you’re familiar with, Heller, Bruen, et cetera, Miller, is merely persuasive authority,” Cuccinelli said. “It is not controlling on the Virginia courts.”
Cuccinelli provided details on Wednesday’s oral arguments, which lasted for four hours, outlining the arguments lawyers from Democratic Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones’ office presented to the judge.
“I started, particularly here at the 250th anniversary [of Virginia’s constitution being adopted], by reflecting on sections one, two, and three of the Declaration of Rights, which were adopted at the same time as Section 13,” Cuccinelli said. “And the back half of Section 3 in particular claims the right for the people, not the militia, the people to throw off a tyrannical government.”
“So fast forward over to Section 13. Who are the militia?” Cuccinelli added. “And famously, Mason said, we are the militia. They are the whole people, and that was never disputed in that time period and the Commonwealth didn’t dispute that. They really didn’t take us on [over] a lot of these things because they’re resting on a determination of collective rights.”
The “collective rights” theory holds that the Second Amendment was intended to prevent state militias (which is now viewed as the National Guard) from being disarmed, and that there is no individual right to own a firearm. Both federal law (10 USC 246) and Virginia law (sections 44-1 and 44-4 of Chapter 1 of Title 44) recognize an “unorganized militia.”
“The emphasized clause was added in 1971 and did not exist in any prior Constitution of Virginia. Rather than placing it in a free-standing section, the drafters embedded it inside the militia provision, joined to the militia clause by the conjunctive adverb ‘therefore,’” Jones’ office claimed in a response to a lawsuit filed by pro-Second Amendment groups in Lancaster County Circuit Court. “That structure tied the new clause to the language that preceded it, making the right-to-bear-arms clause a consequence of the militia clause, not a free-standing guarantee.”
Cuccinelli took issue with Jones’s office’s legal theory, noting how George Mason, one of the Founding Fathers, defined the militia when the ratification of the United States Constitution was debated in Virginia.
“The unorganized militia, and we talked a little bit about the phrase today, comes from the early 1900s federal law, and we use that framing because that’s the current legal framing,” Cuccinelli told the DCNF. “But Mason’s framing was the people, and in the Virginia Ratification Convention, when he asked the question, who are the militia? We all are. It’s the entire people, minus a few public officers, meaning what would have then been the equivalent of the National Guard and the activated militia.”
“One of the things Mason was concerned about, and it came out of the Stuart era that led into the Glorious Revolution and the right to bear arms being broadly spread out, was the Stuarts’ use of select militias,” Cuccinelli continued. “Well, and I argued strenuously that if today’s Commonwealth government can disarm the people, but not the National Guard, then they have themselves a Stuart-era select militia.”
Jones and Spanberger did not respond to requests for comment from the DCNF.
In a ruling issued Thursday, Spotsylvania County Circuit Judge William Glover denied a preliminary injunction, accepting the argument from Jones’ office that there was no individual right to own a “military style” firearm.
“I anticipate appealing the denial of the [preliminary injunction],” Cuccinelli told the DCNF.
“We are disappointed that the court decided not to enjoin this constitutionally problematic new bill and we are reviewing the opinion and weighing our options for potential future appeal,” SAF Senior Director of Legal Operations William Sack told the DCNF.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
