The Virginia Court of Appeals has rejected a Richmond man’s challenge to the constitutionality of a state law regulating machine guns. 

“The Second Amendment,” wrote the court in its June 10 opinion, “does not protect the right to possess dangerous and unusual weapons like machine guns.” 

The case, which came out of Richmond Circuit Court, stemmed from the July 2023 arrest of Rasheed Fleming on a charge of unlawfully possessing a machine gun for an offensive or aggressive purpose. 

Fleming was entering a convenience store on Richmond’s Northside when officers with the Richmond Police Department recognized him because of a felony warrant that was out for his arrest. After police stopped him, they found he was carrying a grocery bag that contained a loaded Glock 22 handgun with an extended magazine and a switch that could convert the gun from a semi-automatic to a fully automatic weapon. 

Fleming was subsequently indicted for carrying the gun under Virginia’s Uniform Machine Gun Act, which defines a machine gun as “any weapon which shoots or is designed to shoot automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” (Virginia has also since banned auto sears, the small plastic or metal devices that can convert a gun into a fully automatic weapon, but that law was not on the books at the time of Fleming’s arrest.) 

In court, Fleming argued that the state Uniform Machine Gun Act violated his Second Amendment rights and was “overly broad, vague and ambiguous.” In his view, carrying the machine gun was a constitutionally protected activity in the same way that carrying a “regular gun or a rifle” would be. 

Richmond Judge Claire Cardwell rejected that argument in an April 2024 ruling, upholding prior court rulings that machine guns are “‘dangerous and unusual’ and thus are not ‘weapons in common use.’” 

“It is unusual for a person on a lawful mission to have a machinegun in their possession outside of their home or place of business and the possession of a machinegun is not an ordinary self-defense need,” she wrote. 

Fleming appealed the decision to the state appeals court, which also ruled against him in an opinion that leaned heavily on U.S. Supreme Court and other federal court decisions. 

“A line of recent United States Supreme Court cases beginning with [District of Columbia v.] Heller have repeatedly instructed ‘that the right [to bear arms] was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,’” the appeals court wrote. 

Todd Ritter, an attorney with Hill & Rainey who represented Fleming in his appeal, said while the ruling was not what he had hoped for, “it was not entirely unexpected.” 

“The majority of courts that have considered the question of whether the 2nd Amendment protects fully automatic weapons (machine guns) have concluded, like our Court of Appeals in this decision, that these firearms are dangerous and unusual weapons and do not receive protection,” he said. 

Ritter said Fleming has not yet decided whether to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Virginia. 

While Fleming has completed his sentence on the machine gun charge, he was indicted this June for the first degree murder of Kanye Lewis in Whitcomb Court on March 25.  

Contact Reporter Sarah Vogelsong at svogelsong@richmonder.org.