A GOA-drafted bill to restore civilian access to machine guns cleared committee, vanished in the Senate, and left a trail of accusations that could haunt Tom Willis all the way to the U.S. Senate primary
“At Ease”
It was just after 7 p.m. on Monday, March 2, when Senate Judiciary Chairman Tom Willis did something that confused half the people in the room.
The committee had been taking testimony on Senate Bill 1071, a bill that had lit up gun-rights media from coast to coast, a bill that would direct the West Virginia State Police to purchase fully automatic machine guns and sell them to qualified residents at troop headquarters across the state. Gun Owners of America (GOA) had drafted it. National gun media was covering it in real time. Supporters were lighting up phone lines and filling email inboxes at the Capitol.
Then Willis called for the committee to be “at ease” and disappeared into a back room with a handful of members.
The senators who remained at the table looked around. Nobody was presiding. Several members noted aloud that a quorum no longer appeared to be present. Eventually, members drifted out. The committee adjourned. What exactly happened next depends on who you ask, and that disagreement is now at the center of a fight that stretches from the halls of the Capitol to the Republican primary for the United States Senate.
The Bill Nobody Expected
SB 1071, formally titled the “Public Defense and Provisioning Act,” landed in the Legislature on February 23, seven days before the Crossover Day deadline that requires bills to clear their chamber of origin. It was introduced by Sen. Chris Rose (R-Monongalia) and Sen. Zack Maynard (R-Lincoln), but its real architect was Gun Owners of America, the national organization that has spent years positioning itself as the no-compromise alternative to the NRA.
The bill’s legal theory was ambitious, to put it mildly. Since 1986, the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act has banned the civilian transfer of any machine gun manufactured after May 19 of that year. The result has been an artificial scarcity market where pre-1986 transferable machine guns sell for $20,000 to $50,000 or more, putting them out of reach for ordinary Americans.
But the Hughes Amendment contains a carve-out. Federal law at 18 U.S.C. § 922(o)(2)(A) permits transfers “to or by, or possession by or under the authority of, the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof.”
GOA’s argument was straightforward: if the State of West Virginia creates an office within the State Police that acquires machine guns and transfers them to qualified citizens, those transfers are “by” and “under the authority of” a state. No nullification. No defiance of federal law. Just a plain-text reading of the exemption Congress wrote 40 years ago.
The bill would have created an Office of Public Defense headed by the State Police Superintendent. That office would purchase M16/AR-15 platform rifles, M249-type squad automatic weapons, MP5 submachine guns, and other firearms “in common use by the military or law enforcement.” Buyers would undergo the same background checks required for any other firearm purchase in West Virginia. The state would charge a $250 surcharge per gun plus up to $50 in administrative costs. Private transfers between qualified owners would also be facilitated through the office for a $275 fee.
The bill’s legislative findings ran for pages, citing District of Columbia v. Heller, Article III, Section 22 of the West Virginia Constitution, and historical sources dating back to the founding era to argue that the right to bear “arms of modern warfare” is constitutionally protected and practically necessary for state defense.
If it worked, West Virginia would become the first state since 1986 to put new, select-fire weapons into civilian hands at prices ordinary people could actually afford.
GOA Goes All In
From the moment the bill dropped, GOA treated SB 1071 as a flagship campaign. National alerts went out. State-level calls to action urged supporters to flood the Senate Judiciary Committee email inboxes and voicemail boxes. Social media lit up with posts framing West Virginia as the state that could “lead the nation” on Second Amendment restoration.
GOA’s Senior Vice President Erich Pratt put it in sweeping terms, arguing that Congress had included an explicit exemption for state transfers and that West Virginia was simply demonstrating that states have both the authority and the responsibility to defend the Second Amendment.
The messaging was deliberate. GOA emphasized repeatedly that this was not nullification, not a fringe stunt, but a “smart, lawful approach” built on existing federal language. They also pitched the bill as an economic development tool, arguing it could generate revenue for the state, attract firearms manufacturers, and relieve budget pressure without raising taxes.
At the committee hearing on March 2, GOA’s volunteer state director Alex Shay told lawmakers directly that West Virginia was not flying in the face of federal law, insisting the bill simply applied the statute as written.
Not everyone in the Capitol was buying the urgency. A source familiar with Capitol lobbying dynamics described GOA’s approach as a familiar playbook: come in late in the session with a high-profile bill, and when the inevitable procedural speed bumps arrive, blame everyone, bash the legislators, attack any competing pro-gun group that might dilute loyalty, and then ask followers for money to help ensure passage next year. Whether that characterization is fair or cynical depends on your vantage point, but it is a reading of events that more than a few people inside the building shared last week.
What is less debatable is the result. According to the same source, GOA’s aggressive public attacks on legislators, leadership, and people with trusted relationships inside the Capitol did not build the coalition the organization needed. They did the opposite. Senators and leadership who might have been persuadable were instead put on the defensive, and the pressure campaign that was supposed to move the bill may have contributed to burying it.
The Lobbyist in the Room
But the first signs of trouble emerged days before the hearing.
On February 25, GOA published an alert with an unusual target: not anti-gun Democrats, not the Biden administration, but what GOA called a “so-called pro-gun lobbyist” operating inside the Capitol. According to GOA, this lobbyist was telling senators that SB 1071 violated federal law, a claim GOA called flatly untrue. They attached a legal fact sheet and urged supporters to counter the lobbyist’s influence by flooding Senate phone lines and inboxes.
GOA never named the lobbyist or the organization. But in the online gun community, the speculation was immediate and pointed almost entirely in one direction: the West Virginia Citizens Defense League, the state’s established, well-respected, homegrown gun-rights organization.
AmmoLand writer John Crump later reported that a lobbyist working for WVCDL had verbally threatened to kill the bill in front of multiple lawmakers, expressing concern that if SB 1071 passed, State Police officers transferring machine guns could be federally prosecuted. According to Crump, the same lobbyist threatened to kill similar legislation in other states, including Kentucky.
The narrative that took hold online, fueled by GOA’s alerts and Crump’s reporting, was that WVCDL was an obstacle to machine gun rights in West Virginia. But the full picture is considerably more complicated than GOA’s version of events.
For starters, WVCDL had no official position on SB 1071. The organization confirmed to The WV WASP that it neither endorsed nor opposed the bill. What WVCDL did support was House Bill 4185, introduced by Delegate Charles Horst on January 14, more than five weeks before SB 1071 even existed. HB 4185 took a fundamentally different approach to the same goal: instead of creating a new state office, turning the State Police into arms dealers, and testing an untried federal loophole theory, it simply repealed West Virginia’s state-level ban on machine gun possession. One page. One section of code. Done.
In other words, the state’s largest homegrown gun-rights organization was not opposing machine guns. It was backing a cleaner, simpler bill that had been filed weeks earlier, a detail that GOA’s national alerts never once mentioned.
WVCDL’s primary legislative focus this session was elsewhere entirely: the expansion of constitutional carry to all law-abiding adults, a priority the organization had championed for years. Those bills passed both respective chambers and were awaiting further action in the opposite chamber at the time SB 1071 was consuming all the oxygen in the building. As one source put it, their [WVCDL] “laser focus and long-standing relationships” ensured movement on those bills, a quiet reminder that the organization’s influence in Charleston is built on years of relationship-based lobbying, not last-minute national pressure campaigns.
None of this definitively settles whether WVCDL or its lobbyist actively worked to sink SB 1071 behind the scenes. The allegations from GOA allies are specific and detailed. But the framing that WVCDL was somehow anti-Second Amendment or hostile to machine gun rights does not survive contact with the legislative record. The two organizations simply had different theories about how to get there, and very different styles of operating inside the Capitol.
Willis: Gatekeeper and Candidate
No one was more central to SB 1071’s fate than Tom Willis, and no one had more competing incentives.
Willis, a first-term state senator from Berkeley County, had already made a name for himself by defeating incumbent Senate President Craig Blair in the 2024 Republican primary, a result that shook the Capitol establishment. He was rewarded with the Judiciary chairmanship late in 2025, an unusually powerful perch for a first term lawmaker, and Senate President Randy Smith publicly praised his ability to manage heavy, controversial legislation.
But Willis is also, simultaneously, running for the United States Senate. He officially launched his campaign in July 2025, positioning himself as a constitutional conservative and “no-compromise” Second Amendment champion challenging incumbent Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. He loaned significant personal funds to his campaign. His campaign website explicitly touted his pro-gun bona fides, including opposition to red flag laws and weapons bans.
SB 1071 put all of those identities into direct conflict.
As Judiciary chairman, Willis controlled whether the bill got a hearing, when it moved, and how the committee vote was conducted. As a self-described “no-compromise” Second Amendment candidate, he had every reason to champion the most aggressive pro-gun bill in modern American history. But as a political realist running in a statewide primary where electability matters, he also had reason to worry about owning a “novel legal concept” (his own words) that could blow up spectacularly if the ATF refused to process a single transfer.
The result was a performance that looked, to supporters and critics alike, like a man trying to have it both ways.
On the record, Willis spoke warmly about SB 1071. After the March 2 evening floor session, he told reporters that West Virginians could freely buy machine guns before 1986, that the state was “trying to get back to that state of being,” and that this was “the proper state for the Second Amendment.” He also acknowledged, in the same breath, that the bill relied on “a loophole created in the federal law” and represented “a novel legal concept” under federal statute, language that practically invited doubt.
Behind the scenes, the picture looked different. According to GOA, Willis initially pulled the bill from the Judiciary calendar on Friday, February 27, before the committee ever heard testimony. GOA accused him of denying gun owners a recorded vote. Their alert that day reminded supporters, with unmistakable meaning, that Willis “will rely upon” those same gun owners “when he tries to be your next U.S. Senator.”
Then came the whiplash. GOA published an update saying Willis was scheduling a vote. Then another update saying he had pulled the bill again, citing lack of “consensus.” Then the chaotic March 2 committee meeting where the bill seemingly passed by voice vote, Willis left for a back room, and the whole proceeding dissolved into confusion.
The Vanishing Act
GOA claimed unequivocally that SB 1071 passed out of Judiciary on March 2 by voice vote. Willis himself told reporters the bill had been “reported out” and was now “in the wheels of the Senate.”
But by March 3, the bill had not arrived in the Finance Committee. The Legislature’s bill-tracking system showed it leaving Judiciary but going nowhere. GOA published another alert, this one titled “Unprecedented Attack on our Machine Gun Sales Bill,” accusing Willis of failing to properly report the bill out of committee despite every other bill being reported that night.
Did Willis not report the bill out of his committee? Did leadership not accept the report? Whether this was a procedural error, a deliberate act, or something in between remains genuinely unclear. What is clear is the result: SB 1071 never reached Finance before the Crossover Day deadline, was never read on the Senate floor, and was, for all practical purposes, dead.
Sen. Laura Wakim Chapman (R-Ohio), a constitutional lawyer and vocal Second Amendment supporter, went to the floor to deliver a blunt postmortem. She called the outcome a disgrace, saying the bill had been killed without transparency and without consensus, with the decision made in the dark despite what she characterized as overwhelming support from the body. “This is exactly why the public doesn’t trust politicians,” she said.
Lead sponsor Chris Rose conceded that, absent extraordinary action like a suspension of the rules requiring a two-thirds vote, the bill was dead for the session.
Willis, for his part, told WV MetroNews that whether the bill could be revived “will be a question for the caucus to see what the political will is,” adding that he would personally like to see it become law.
The Troopers Spoke Up, Too
Lost somewhat in the GOA-versus-Willis narrative was a quieter but significant concern raised during the committee hearing itself.
Lonnie Faircloth, president of the West Virginia Troopers Association, testified briefly and didn’t mince words. He expressed personal misgivings, noting that the bill would involve transferring machine guns to private citizens, potentially making both those citizens and the troopers facilitating the transfers into federal felons. Faircloth pointedly observed that SB 1071 claimed to have found a loophole that neither the NRA, the Citizens Defense League, nor anyone else had previously identified, and that it proposed turning the State Police into firearms dealers.
The Troopers Association’s concerns were not political posturing. They represented the practical reality that the men and women who would actually be responsible for executing the program, storing weapons in existing barracks, processing transfers, navigating ATF paperwork, had real doubts about whether they would be on the right side of federal criminal law.
Sen. Ryan Weld (R-Brooke) raised his own legal concern during the hearing, pointing to another provision of federal code that limits machine gun transfers by state agencies to other government entities for law enforcement purposes, not to private citizens. That provision, if a court found it controlling, could gut the entire legal theory underpinning SB 1071.
What This Means for Willis’s Senate Campaign
The SB 1071 saga may end up being a footnote in the 2026 legislative session, but it has the potential to become a recurring headache in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate.
Willis is running against incumbent Shelley Moore Capito, a two-term senator with a $4.35 million war chest, a Trump endorsement, and a long track record of avoiding unnecessary fights. His entire theory of the race depends on convincing Republican primary voters that he is the more authentically conservative choice: the Green Beret, the outsider who knocked off a sitting Senate president, the no-compromise constitutionalist.
SB 1071 complicates that narrative in several ways.
For the grassroots gun community that GOA has mobilized nationally, Willis is now associated with the death of the most ambitious pro-gun bill in the country. GOA’s alerts explicitly connected his handling of SB 1071 to his Senate ambitions, and their polling (which should be taken with appropriate caveats about methodology and sample) claimed 96 percent of West Virginia gun owners would be more likely to support a legislator who backed the bill, while 93 percent would be less likely to support one who worked to kill it.
National gun media has picked up the storyline. Bearing Arms published a piece pointedly noting that Willis’s campaign website describes him as “no-compromise” on the Second Amendment, while he is not a sponsor of SB 1071. The writer observed that opposing gun control is not the same thing as being pro-Second Amendment, a distinction that cuts directly at Willis’s campaign brand.
Capito, meanwhile, can afford to ignore the entire episode. She was never involved, bears no responsibility, and can continue running on her record and Trump’s endorsement without engaging in the machine gun debate at all. Willis’s challenge from the right just got harder, because a significant and vocal segment of the pro-gun base now has a specific grievance with his name on it.
Whether primary opponents choose to exploit this remains to be seen. The Republican primary field has been fluid, with several challengers positioning themselves as more conservative alternatives to Capito, and the machine gun bill gives any of them a ready-made line of attack: if you won’t fight for the Second Amendment when you have the chairman’s gavel, why should voters trust you’ll fight in Washington?
The Bigger Picture
Whatever one thinks of SB 1071’s legal theory (and reasonable people on both sides of the gun debate disagree sharply), the bill’s journey through Charleston exposed fault lines that matter well beyond machine guns.
The first is the growing tension between national gun organizations and state-level groups. GOA came into West Virginia with a bill it drafted, a legal theory it developed, and a national grassroots machine it could deploy on command. The state’s own pro-gun infrastructure had been working the machine gun issue through a different vehicle, HB 4185, since January, but that bill and that approach were never acknowledged in GOA’s messaging. Instead, the local group was painted as an obstacle. That dynamic, an outside organization with national ambitions pressuring a state legislature while local groups with actual Capitol relationships get vilified for not falling in line, is playing out across the country on a range of issues, and it is not going away.
The second is the structural problem of West Virginia’s 60-day session. SB 1071 was introduced on February 23, referred to two committees, and needed to clear both plus the full Senate before Crossover Day on March 5. That is an almost impossible timeline for any bill with two committee referrals, let alone one raising a “novel legal concept” under federal law. Whether SB 1071 was killed by political maneuvering, run-of-the-mill calendar math, or some combination of both is a question that may never have a clean answer.
The third is the oldest tension in representative government: the gap between what activists demand and what legislators calculate they can safely deliver. GOA wanted a recorded vote. Willis wanted consensus. The troopers wanted assurance they wouldn’t become federal defendants. Republican leadership wanted to avoid owning a test case that could generate national headlines of exactly the wrong kind. None of those positions is inherently unreasonable. All of them were irreconcilable in the final week of session.
GOA has already signaled that this fight is not over. Wyoming lawmakers are reportedly exploring similar legislation. Kentucky has already seen a companion bill introduced. The legal theory will be back, probably in multiple states, and probably with GOA leading the charge.
As for Willis, the question is whether the voters he needs most, the ones who answer GOA alerts and call their senators at 8 p.m. on a Monday, will remember how SB 1071 died when his name appears on the May 2026 primary ballot.
Based on the volume of phone calls and emails Senate offices fielded last week, they probably will.🐝
The West Virginia WASP is a West Virginia political news, humor, and commentary outlet. Follow @wvwasp on X. 🐝
The WV WASP takes no editorial position on SB 1071. This article is a reported account of the bill’s legislative journey and the political dynamics surrounding it.