Democrat Jay Jones, candidate for Virginia attorney general, still has not suspended his campaign, even as pressure mounts over disclosures that should disqualify, to put it mildly, any individual from serving as the chief law enforcement official of any jurisdiction. Jones has been endorsed by every major national gun control organization for his professed commitment to “gun safety.” Everytown for Gun Safety and Mom’s Demand Action, in particular, named him their the ‘gun sense’ champion and donated some $200,000 to his campaign. Yet, judging by their silence on the matter, none of these “commonsense gun safety” organizations seem troubled by recent revelations of Jones’ violent and vile ideations concerning his pollical opponents.
The recent troubles for Jones arose from an Oct. 3 National Review article, which detailed text messages from 2022 Jones sent to a member of the Virginia legislature concerning then House Speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican. Jones himself had recently resigned from his legislative post representing Norfolk.
The content of the texts – which Jones has not denied – virtually defies belief, particularly when attributed to a lawyer seeking a career in elected office and communicating in a format he must have known would be preserved.
The National Review article indicated Jones was seething over Gilbert’s laudatory remarks about a recently deceased Democrat member of the legislature and musing about what that “POS Gilbert” would “say about me if I died.”Jones continued, “If those guys [i.e., Republicans praising their deceased Democrat colleague] die before me I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.”
Jones then escalated his deranged rhetoric:
Three people, two bullets
Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot
Gilbert gets two bullets to the head
Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time
At this point, The National Review reported, the recipient of the texts told Jones to stop and objected that what he was saying was not okay.
According to another source, however, Jones then called the recipient of the texts, Republican House Delegate Carrie Coyner, and elaborated even further. Referencing the unnamed source, the article stated that Jones “suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust.”
Jones, according to National Review, still wasn’t finished. He then continued his text barrage to Coyner. “Yes, I’ve told you this before,” he wrote. “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” The National Review piece continued:
Faced with more pushback from his frazzled former colleague, Jones somehow took the conversation a step further: “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes,” he wrote, referring to Gilbert’s wife and two young children.
Confronted with the texts, Jones was initially defiant and dismissive, stating: “Jason Miyares [his Republican opponent for attorney general] is dropping smears through Trump-controlled media organizations to assault my character and rescue his desperate campaign.” After his texts were rebuked by Democrat gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger (who nevertheless did not call for Jones to quit the race), Jones changed his tone and claimed to be embarrassed, ashamed, and sorry.
Certainly, he is not sorry or ashamed enough to step aside during a critical Virginia election. And, as this went to press anti-gun groups like Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action, Giffords, and Brady PAC are likewise not shocked or embarrassed enough to issue a direct admonishment of Jones, request he step aside, or demand the return of any donations.
To many, it is clear this is not merely heated rhetoric but a revealing look at how a leading candidate for statewide office in Virginia views those who disagree with him politically. Even if the remarks are characterized as jokes or a person blowing off steam to a former colleague, the malice, intensity, and bad judgment they displayed cannot be ignored or minimized. This is especially so, as they continued and escalated, even as the recipient expressed discomfort and horror in response.
Additionally, a second report last week accused Jones of suggesting that if more police officers were killed, they would shoot fewer people … this in the context of discussing qualified immunity issues for law enforcement. Jones denied these particular remarks, which appear not to have been memorialized in any format.
This, again, is a man wanting to be elected by the people to the state’s top law enforcement role responsible for representing the state and its agencies, providing legal guidance, and enforcing the law as the state’s top prosecutor.
Jones also sustained a conviction of reckless driving in 2022 for speeding at 116mph, an offense for which most Virginians could expect jail time. Jones, however, avoided jail time and then used work on his own political action committee to fulfill his “community service” commitment.
Unsurprisingly, Virginia’s leading law enforcement organization of sworn officers, the Virginia Fraternal Order of Police, has issued a statement declaring Jones unfit for office and demanding his withdrawal:
You, Jay Jones, are unfit for the office of Attorney General of Virginia. It is time you hold yourself accountable for these actions and withdraw from the Attorney General race immediately.
Election Day in Virginia is less than a month away. Early voting is well underway, with hundreds of thousands of ballots cast before the scandal involving Jones’s 2022 statements to Coyner came to light. Yet while all eyes focus on the Commonwealth, this is ultimately about more than a political race in Virginia.
It is also about the ongoing hypocrisy of anti-gun political extremists, who claim to want safety for all but in reality crave power for themselves and those who share their ideology. It is about the moral turpitude of those working to obtain leadership positions that scream outrage toward law-abiding gun owners and the Second Amendment but somehow ignore grotesque suggestions of violence as a path to political change by one of their own.
If a leading Democrat candidate for statewide office in Virginia is willing to embrace the view that only the suffering and death of his political opponents will lead to the sort of reforms he embraces, what does that say about his willingness to respect those same opponents’ constitutional rights? Is abandoning human decency and fantasizing about a woman’s children, or what he called her “little fascists,” dying in her arms a lesser sin than simply disregarding her political rights?
Is the deafening silence and lack of outrage by anti-gun organizations meant to normalize, if not tacitly condone, Jones’s behavior and thinking? Is it so hard for them to say that they disagree, that he doesn’t represent their own point of view?
Jones had been listed on Everytown’s “Gun Sense Voter” endorsement page claiming him to be a candidate demonstrating support for “stronger gun laws and advocat[ing] for safer communities if elected into office.” That endorsement page has since quietly disappeared, among other similar endorsements and pages by other firearm prohibition groups.
Jones’ unfiltered opinions and animosity, expressed via text, however, will live on and on, serving as a constant reminder to Virginians and the world of the price some politicians and their anti-gun supporters are willing to pay to gain power over the people they consider their mortal enemies.
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