"A pro-gun group has been calling Republicans around Charlottesville and urging them to nominate Albemarle County businesswoman Sharon L. Jones for the Virginia Senate, using a message some members of the same party attack as misleading.

Several Albemarle Republicans denounced the calls Thursday as 'shabby,' saying they distort the positions of GOP candidate Jane Maddux at a time when her son, John Maddux Jr., is hospitalized for a gunshot wound he received last week in a hunting accident.

The calls, made by Gun Owners of America in Northern Virginia, assert that Jones is 'the only supporter of guns and is running against an anti-gun person,' said Albemarle Republican Charles A. Abbey, who received a call Wednesday.

Abbey said a recorded message from Larry Pratt, executive director of the pro-gun organization, urges Republicans to attend Saturday's GOP nominating convention at Western Albemarle High School on behalf of Jones. 'I don't lke campaigns like that,' said Abbey, a Maddux supporter.

Maddux herself came down from her son's hospital room at the University of Virginia Medical Center to denounce the calls at a Thursday news conference outside the hospital's front entrance.

'I'm just shocked,' she said. 'It portrayed me as anti-gun, which is anything but the truth.'

Her son's gunshot wound to his left arm in a hunting accident Nov. 9 in eastern Virginia 'has absolutely not changed my views on Second Amendment rights,' Maddux said. 'It's not guns that hurt people. It's people.'

Jones said Thursday that she did not authorize the calls but would not denounce them.

'I had no knowledge that they were going out. It was not issued by my campaign,' Jones said from her new campaign headquarters in the Pantops Shopping Center.

'I am a pro-gun candidate,' she said, adding that she does not know Maddux's position on guns. Both women said that they are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and would vote to repeal the state's one-gun-a-month law.

Jones said she declined to denounce the calls because 'it's a free country. They can speak and say what they want to say.'

'I wish that the situation was different,' Jones said of the hospitalization of her nomination opponent's 24-year-old son, who has undergone surgery three times to repair his shattered left forearm.

But John Maddux called the group's calls 'lewd, distasteful and uncalled for.'

'To imply that Jane is anti-gun and anti-Second Amendment, even at this point, is not fair,' he said.

'It's shabby,' said Bessie Birckhead, who supports Maddux. 'It's below the belt,' added Patricia W. Earle.

Ken Boyd, an Albemarle School Board member who received and taped one of the calls, said they 'bothered me.'

'It's such a distortion of what I know that her views are. It's in poor taste,' he said.

Boyd said Pratt knows so little about the area he woefully mispronounced Crozet when directing Republicans to Saturday's nominating mass meeting at Western Albemarle High School.

Jones is vying with Maddux for the party's nomination to run for the 25th District Senate seat. Democrats nominated Del. R. Creigh Deeds of Bath County last weekend.

The winner of a Dec. 18 special election will fill the final two years of late senator Emily Couric's term.

Maddux said her son is doing better following the surgery and must ahve another operation in the next few eeeks.

'I'm just so appreciative of all the kindnesses' she and the family have received, Maddux said. 'We're just so fortunate he's alive.'

Pratt did not return several telephone calls to his office" (Bob Gibson, The Daily Progress, November 16, 2001).