VIRGINIA: Dem AG Candidate Jay Jones Puts Students' Lives at Risk to Attack Gun Rights

Former Virginia Del. Jay Jones is trying again to become the state’s Attorney General, after losing the 2021 Democratic nomination, but his views on policing and school safety are still just as dangerous as ever.

In a 2020 interview with WTKR 3, then-Del. Jones spoke of school resource officers (SROs) as if they pose a threat to schoolchildren rather than those seeking to harm children, such as potential school shooters. SRO’s are armed law enforcement officers stationed at schools to protect students and staff.

"I think a goal for a lot of us is to ensure that we have as few SROs in our schools as possible, so that the schools can be laboratories of learning and not some situation where you have armed folks just patrolling," he said.

But the "armed folks just patrolling" were there precisely so schools could be laboratories of learning, free from fear.

"I think Charlottesville took a really great and bold step by removing [SROs] from schools," Jones added, referring to Charlottesville schools ending their contract with local police following George Floyd’s death. "I certainly think that’s the goal over the next three to five to 10 years is to make sure that we don’t have to have so many SROs in our schools, and if we do have to have them, that we have the proper data collection, proper training."

Restoration News’ Victoria Manning, who then served on the Virginia Beach School Board, reminded WKTR 3 that the prior year, her district had a student who brough a gun and bullets to school, adding, "So, I think it’s really important that we have trained, armed security police officers to be able to deal with that."

Jones’ view of SROs as a public nuisance rather than a protection safety net fits with his definition of "proper training." A few months prior to this interview, he introduced HB 1419 to force SROs to undergo "implicit bias" training.

The double-edged sword of Jones’s attitude toward SROs and firearms makes it impossible for leftists like him to pursue policies that protect schoolchildren from predators and mass shooters. On the one hand, he views police as inherently biased, so they can’t be trusted to be around children of certain racial persuasions until an overpaid bureaucrat who specializes in the latest racial theory brainwashes it out of them. On the other hand, he would never consent to arming teachers and janitors, considering his 2nd Amendment record.

Attacking Gunmakers Won’t Protect Dead Children

Instead of providing protection to schoolchildren, Jones wants to go after gun manufacturers "whose weapons of war are used to commit mass shootings and crimes." Perennially elitist Democrats tend to get the creeps when they see guns and would scrap the 2nd Amendment entirely if they could. But if Jones is sincere in wanting to stop school shootings, wasting Virginians’ tax dollars on lawsuits against gun manufacturers—which he would lose—makes no sense.

The only way to preempt school shootings is to stop the shooters, not make their planning marginally more challenging. Even if the threat of lawsuits did convince gun manufacturers to stop making whatever fits Jones’s definition of "weapons of war," it would not eliminate the millions of firearms in circulation to which most school shooters avail themselves.

School shootings have been an annual occurrence since the 1999 Columbine massacre, except in 2020, thanks to remote learning. The only sure way to end attempted school shootings would be to eliminate in-person learning. But this would simply trade the tiny number of attempted school shootings every year with a drastic uptick in teen suicide attempts.

From 2020–2024, only 51 in 100,000 American students were exposed to a school shooting—defined as attending a school in the same year a shooting occurred. It’s also noteworthy that these school shootings don’t only include active shooter situations but can include handgun violence in school parking lots after class hours.

Perhaps Jones thinks that after forcing manufacturers out of business, Democrats will find a way to confiscate all "weapons of war." But even if Virginia Democrats swept the governor’s office and legislature, such an unconstitutional ban or buyback program would ever pass Supreme Court muster.

Vowing to take on gun manufacturers shows a lack of seriousness about protecting children from future school shooters and a gross politicization of a rare but recurring modern American tragedy. SRO programs should be strengthened, not defunded or phased out. Jones seems to view police officers are a necessary evil that must be deprogramed to prevent them from becoming a threat to the very people they’re supposed to serve and protect. Virginian schoolchildren deserve better from their chief law enforcement officer.

(READ MORE: Gun Owners, Here's What Virginia Would Look Like If Dem Abigail Spanberger Was Governor)