The bottom line
Jay Jones, a man who fantasized in writing about shooting a Republican lawmaker twice in the head and expressed hope that the lawmaker’s children would die, just became Virginia’s attorney general with the full backing of the national gun control movement. The gun control groups that claim to oppose political violence endorsed him anyway, and most of them never said a word about what he wrote.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What Jones actually wrote
In August 2022, Jay Jones, then a Virginia delegate and Democratic nominee for attorney general, sent text messages that have since become public. The exchange involved a variation of the “two bullets, three people” thought experiment. Jones’s answer placed Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert alongside Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert, according to Jones, “gets two bullets to the head.” Not one. Two. And Jones made clear Gilbert was his preferred target.
It did not stop there. When the person he was texting pushed back on the implication that Jones was going after someone’s children, Jones confirmed it. He said he believed Gilbert and his wife were “breeding little fascists.” His stated reason for wishing violence on Gilbert was a policy disagreement. Todd Gilbert opposed gun control. That was it. That was the entire justification for putting him in a category with two of history’s most prolific mass murderers and fantasizing about shooting him twice.
Jones went on to say that people only move on policy when they “feel pain personally.” Read that sentence again in the context of everything else he wrote. He was not making an abstract philosophical point about political motivation. He was expressing the view that causing suffering to his political opponents and their families is a legitimate tool of policy change.
The gun control industry’s response tells you everything
I want to be clear about something before I go further. I am not talking about rank-and-file gun control supporters. Most people who favor stricter gun laws are operating in good faith. They genuinely believe, incorrectly in my view, that restricting firearms reduces harm. I disagree with them, but I am not attributing malice to the average person who signs a Moms Demand Action petition.
I am talking about the organizations. The ones with the lobbyists and the million-dollar war chests and the highly paid executives who give press conferences about the sanctity of preventing violence.
Giffords PAC, named after a congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt, endorsed Jay Jones and gave his campaign $1,000. As of the time these texts became public, their endorsement was still live on their website. The organization named after a gunshot victim backed a man who wrote about shooting a political opponent. That is not an oversight. That is a statement of priorities.
Brady PAC, which has spent decades building a brand around opposing gun violence, endorsed Jones and quietly pulled the endorsement from its website after the texts surfaced. No public statement. No press release calling for him to withdraw. Just a silent deletion, hoping no one would notice. After Jones won his election in November 2025, Brady PAC described itself as having “proudly” supported him. The quiet delete was replaced with a victory lap.
Everytown for Gun Safety, Michael Bloomberg’s flagship gun control organization, had donated $200,000 to Jones’s campaign as of late August 2025. When the texts became public, they also scrubbed the endorsement page from their website without comment. Not one of these organizations issued a statement calling Jones’s words disqualifying. Not one called on him to drop out. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, which covers the industry side, noted the silence directly: these groups, built on the premise that certain words and ideologies lead to violence, looked at a man fantasizing about executing a Republican lawmaker and said nothing.
The attorney general problem
Virginia’s attorney general is not a ceremonial position. The office has real enforcement power over state law, real authority to direct prosecutorial resources, and real influence over which legal challenges the state chooses to defend or abandon. Jones has now won that office.
His record in the legislature is consistent with his endorsements. He co-sponsored legislation to expand Virginia’s background check system and helped pass the state’s red flag law in 2020. Those are the official policy positions. What the text messages reveal is the attitude behind those positions.
When I look at cases like United States v. Hoover, where a pro-gun YouTuber was prosecuted by federal authorities in what many in the Second Amendment community believe was an overzealous targeting of a prominent voice, I think about who holds prosecutorial power and what they actually think of the people they are investigating. Jones has made his views on pro-gun Virginians explicit. He compared the most prominent Second Amendment advocate in the Virginia legislature to Hitler and Pol Pot over a policy disagreement and fantasized about shooting him.
That is the man who now directs the Virginia Attorney General’s office. That is the man who will decide which state gun laws to defend in court, which federal Second Amendment challenges to oppose, and how to use the discretionary power of the office when questions about Virginia firearms law arise. If you own a gun in Virginia, this matters to you directly.
Why the “two bullets” framing reveals something deeper
There is a pattern here that goes beyond one bad text message from one bad candidate. Jones is not alone in being unable to conceive that the people on the other side of the gun debate have reasons for their position. He placed Todd Gilbert in the same category as the architects of genocide. Not because Gilbert had done anything violent. Because Gilbert disagreed with him about firearms policy.
That kind of thinking, where policy disagreement becomes moral equivalence with historical atrocity, is what produces fantasies about shooting people. It is also what produces bad law and bad enforcement. If you genuinely believe that the people who disagree with you about background check legislation are comparable to fascists, you are not capable of applying that law fairly or proportionately.
The Second Amendment community has always faced this framing. The argument that wanting to own a gun means you want children to die in school shootings is not a fringe position on the anti-gun side. It is standard rhetoric. Jones made it explicit in those texts: he cannot conceive of why someone would hold the pro-gun position in good faith. In his mind, it is simply evil. And if your political opponents are evil, shooting them is just pest control.
I have no problem defending the Second Amendment to people who genuinely disagree with me. I can explain Heller. I can walk through the historical tradition of firearm regulation. I can argue about what “well-regulated militia” meant in 1791. That conversation is worth having. But you cannot have that conversation with someone who has already decided you deserve two bullets to the head.
Virginia’s pro-gun community is now governed by someone who said that about them
Jones won the November 2025 election and became Virginia’s attorney general-elect despite all of it. The texts were public. The endorsement shell game was documented. The silence from Brady and Giffords and Everytown was noticed. Voters in Virginia returned him anyway, carried by a Democratic wave election.
That is the political reality. And I am not going to pretend it is not significant. The man who wrote those texts now holds one of the most consequential law enforcement positions in a state with millions of gun owners and an active legal environment around firearms law. Virginia passed a series of gun control bills in 2020 when Democrats controlled the legislature, several of which are still being litigated. Jones will have a direct hand in how those cases proceed.
If you are a Virginia gun owner, you need to understand that the attorney general’s office does not view you as a citizen exercising a constitutional right. The man running it put your political allies in a category with history’s worst mass murderers and expressed a wish to shoot them. That is documented. That is in writing. And the people who claim to care most about preventing political violence handed him $201,000 and their endorsements and then said nothing when it came out.
Own a gun in Virginia. Carry if you’re legally able to. Pay attention to what Jones does in that office. Document it. Support the organizations that are fighting Virginia’s gun laws in court. And the next time someone from Giffords or Brady lectures you about the culture of violence in the Second Amendment community, remember that they gave $200,000 and their organizational blessing to a man who wrote about putting two bullets in the head of a Republican speaker of the house.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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