Complacency is not an option in the struggle to preserve the Second Amendment. It is a form of surrender.
On November 3, I was in Virginia knocking on doors and urging my neighbors to get out and vote for the pro-freedom candidates on the Old Dominion’s ballot. It was a beautiful Fall day in the state I call home, and it was almost possible to believe everything was going to be okay for gun owners in this place so intertwined with American history.
Well, history took a different turn on Election Day, November 4, as anti-gun extremists swept into office, not just in Virginia, but also in a closely watched governor’s race in New Jersey (my former home, soon to be governed by anti-gun Democrat Mikie Sherrill. Meanwhile, voters approved an anti-gun “red flag” ballot initiative in Maine, and New York City elected Zohran Kwame Mamdani as its mayor, a proud Democratic Socialist who on May 24, 2022, had posted to X: “We need to ban all guns.”
All this happened the week after NRA went through a necessary restructuring. Tough choices were made precisely because we know what’s at stake for America in the political and legal battles ahead of us and the essential role that NRA must play in those efforts.
Indeed, the November 2025 off-year elections were an indication of the stakes for the federal midterm elections in 2026. They should serve as a wake-up call to gun owners nationwide. The gains we have achieved under President Trump and the pro-gun majorities in the U.S. House and Senate are fragile and vulnerable. If we take them for granted, they may well disappear.
No American gun owner should believe his or her rights are beyond reach.
Post-Biden, the Democrat Party seemed to be floundering, unsure of what it continued to stand for and what the future held for it. But if there was any unifying theme among the Democrat candidates who prevailed in the most high-profile races, it was their zeal to attack the right to keep and bear arms. Gun control remains not just a priority, but the lodestar of the party’s most active and visible members. Their vision is an America of fewer guns and gun owners, if there’s any place left for them at all.
Nobody embodied the contradictions and acrimony of this tendency more than Jay Jones, who, incredibly, was elected as Virginia’s attorney general over the opposition not just of NRA, but also of Virginia’s Fraternal Order of Police and Law Enforcement Sheriff’s Association.
It was bad enough that Jones, without evidence, bragged during his campaign of taking on the NRA and winning (in fact, we barely knew he existed before his candidacy for Virginia attorney general). But he also made national news for texts he sent to a Virginia legislator in 2022 that publicly emerged last October. In them, Jones mused about shooting then Virginia Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert in the head, twice, and watching Gilbert’s children (whom he referred to as “little fascists”) die in their mother’s arms. This, Jay Jones told the legislator, might cause Gilbert to reconsider his political views.
Jones, furthermore, had been endorsed by every major national gun-control group, none of which subsequently revoked their endorsement or even directly condemned his remarks when they became known (Jones did not deny the reports and later apologized to Gilbert).
Someone like that, in my view, doesn’t even have the temperament and good judgment to be licensed to practice law, much less serve as the top law enforcement official of Virginia. But the fact gun-control activists and Virginia Democrats could ignore that well-publicized scandal and install Jay Jones in office shows their tolerance for, if not approval of, his brand of political vitriol.
NRA now faces the fight of its life, with its Fairfax headquarters, indoor range and publishing operations all under the jurisdiction of Jones and his anti-gun compatriots, who now hold both houses of the Virginia legislature, as well as the governor’s office. The firearm prohibition advocates at Giffords hailed the election of Gov. Abigail Spanberger, posting on X that Virginians have “established a gun safety stronghold across the commonwealth!”
With us facing this situation in Virginia, home of America’s largest and oldest gun-rights organization, no American gun owner should believe his or her rights are beyond reach. President Trump, alone, can only do so much. Now, more than ever, Americans must recommit to the fight for freedom.
