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Virginia Gun Rally Live Updates: 22,000 Protesters Oppose New Gun Laws
Amid Tight Security, Virginia Gun Rally Draws Thousands of Supporters
(about 2 hours later)
Thousands of pro-gun advocates, many of them armed, converged on the Virginia State Capitol on Monday, flooding a secure area around the building and packing the surrounding streets with firearms, flags and political posters in a pointed message to state lawmakers who are weighing new gun control proposals.
RICHMOND, Va. — Some people streamed in on buses from faraway cities. Others drove cars through the night from places like Indianapolis and Fredericksburg, Texas, logging hundreds of miles and leaning on coffee and Red Bull. Still others came from only a few counties over, but carrying the same vehement message as the rest: Leave gun laws alone.
The gathering in Richmond, organized to oppose a series of measures being considered in the State Legislature, became a rallying cry for Second Amendment rights nationwide, inspiring cross-country flights from Colorado and road trips from Texas and attracting a crowd of about 22,000 people.
Thousands of people descended on Richmond, the capital of Virginia, on Monday to show support for the rights of gun owners as a push for gun control measures by that state’s newly empowered Democrats has inserted Virginia into a nationwide debate over gun violence and the Second Amendment.
A threat of potential violence had been looming over Virginia’s capital city for days, fueled by reports that white supremacists, armed militia groups and other extremists planned to attend. But as of Monday afternoon, there were no reports of violent skirmishes or major eruptions like the ones that broke out at a far-right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
“I don’t like what they are doing to our rights,” said Raymond Pfaff, 85, from Louisa County, Va., who wore a yellow sign around his neck that read, “First Gun Control and Then People Control.”
Days of preparation and warnings by officials may have helped de-escalate the situation. Experts in managing public demonstrations recommend that officials ban weapons ahead of time if needed, set up a tight security perimeter and control crowds by funneling demonstrators into a limited number of entry and exit points.
“Guns protected this country for a couple of hundred years, and this two-faced governor just wants to take them,” he said, referring to Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat who has agreed to sign provisions banning guns in parks and limiting handgun purchases if Virginia lawmakers approve them.
“What happened in Virginia is they did all of those things,” said Kim Dine, a former police chief for the United States Capitol Police who consulted on a 2017 report analyzing the response to Charlottesville.
“I’m a patriotic American,” Mr. Pfaff said. “The left is going so far left right now.”
Another notable difference: Unlike in Charlottesville, where white nationalists clashed with counterprotesters in a visceral, highly charged atmosphere, the crowd on Monday was largely uniform, with pro-gun supporters far outnumbering any opponents, some of whom canceled their own events to avoid potential problems.
Virginia has a long history of supporting gun rights. Only last year, after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach that left 12 people dead, a special lawmaking session on gun control ended in 90 minutes without any action.
The organizers of the rally, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, and other participants said they also tried to keep the event peaceful.
But a gradual demographic shift has emerged in the state — suburbs have boomed, and the ratio of Virginians in rural areas has shrunk. When Democrats flipped the State Legislature in the fall and won control of the state government for the first time in a generation, they pledged, in part, to swiftly seek new limits to guns. All of that has thrust Virginia into a tense battle over gun rights, and into the center of a national cultural divide.
Vincent Carter, 36, who was picking up trash at the end of the event, said that participants were aware that any violence would most likely have brought unwelcome blame on gun rights groups. “The world was watching,” he said.
“People feel their values are under attack and the emerging liberal elite are either unaware or unresponsive,” Bob Holsworth, a political analyst in Richmond, said of the rally, which the police said drew 22,000 people to the Virginia State Capitol and the wind-chilled streets around it.
During the rally, David Triebs and his two sons held a giant banner across the street from the perimeter entrance, reading “Come and Take It,” a reference to a defiant slogan used by Texan revolutionaries in 1835 when the Mexican authorities demanded the handover of a cannon.Mr. Triebs and his sons drove for 24 hours straight through to Richmond from Fredericksburg, Texas, he said, drinking Red Bulls along the way to stay awake. He said relatives were worried about him coming to Virginia.
For several days, the authorities had been bracing for the possibility of violence, fueled by reports that white supremacists, armed militia groups and other extremists planned to attend the rally, which was organized by the Virginia Citizens Defense League. In the end, the police reported no major incidents or violence and announced only one arrest, of a woman accused of wearing a bandanna to cover her face after being warned not to. (It is illegal in the state to wear a mask in public to conceal one’s identity.)
“The internet stuff I read made it sound like tanks were rolling in the streets and neo-Nazis were marching and antifa has descended,” he said. “But none of that stuff happened. It was like a family gathering.”
The F.B.I. on Thursday had announced the arrest of several people associated with the Base, a white extremist, anti-government group that aims to establish a white “ethno-state,” including three men who had obtained weapons and had discussed attending the rally.
As they packed up their banner to leave after the rally, one of his sons struggled with two tall flagpoles, nearly knocking into a passing pedestrian.
Citing credible “threats of violence,” Governor Northam declared a state of emergency before Monday’s demonstration and temporarily banned all weapons from the Capitol grounds.
“Careful — don’t hit anybody in the last five minutes,” Mr. Triebs said. “If you assault someone with a flagpole, that would be the only thing that made the news.”
About 6,000 people without weapons made their way into the main protest area after waiting in line to go through metal detectors. Thousands more, some proudly displaying firearms and wearing camouflage clothing, packed nearby streets. There were military-style rifles, shotguns, 9-millimeter handguns, .45- and .22-caliber pistols, and even a .50-caliber sniper rifle.
The landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision holding that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to keep and bear arms is known as the Heller decision, after Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that overturned a gun-control law in the District of Columbia.
Chris Dement, 22, said that he was glad to see the demonstration was peaceful but that he was prepared to use a 9-millimeter carbine — which he brought to stand in solidarity — for self-defense in case of violence.
When Mr. Heller addressed the rally in Richmond on Monday, the crowd listened with rapt attention.
“It’s never out of the realm of possibility,” he said.
He got a big reaction when he quoted part of the amendment’s text: “Let’s yell it to them, so the media and left legislature can hear it: The right of the people to keep and bear arms will not be infringed!” The crowd roared the end of the sentence along with him.
Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, an anti-gun organization, wrote on Twitter that “gun extremists” had gathered “in an attempt to intimidate lawmakers out of doing what voters elected them to do: pass common-sense gun laws that will keep our families safe.”
And when he asked the crowd, “Do we need gun control in Virginia?,” the crowd roared back, “No!”
Officials hoped to prevent the kind of deadly clash that engulfed a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when conflict between white nationalists and counterprotesters ended in the death of a counterprotester and left dozens injured.
Another speaker, Sheriff Scott Jenkins of Culpeper County, Va., who has long been outspoken in advocating gun rights, told the crowd, “I ask that you all return to your homes and ask your elected officials, where is the line they will not cross?”
Amid fears of a potential conflict, gun control activists delayed a vigil for victims of gun violence until hours after the rally ended. More than a dozen students, including some who had survived school shootings, waited in an office in the General Assembly building throughout the pro-gun rally, listening to shouting and cheers outside.
After the official speeches, as people began to leave the secure perimeter, participants made impromptu speeches in the street, denouncing abortion and the governor in addition to gun control. Some participants picked up litter and scraped discarded orange “Guns save lives” stickers off the pavement. “No confiscation! No registration!” the crowd chanted.
“Intimidation is not peaceful,” said Andrew Goddard, the legislative director for the Virginia Center for Public Safety, who led the group in a moment of silence for the thousands of people who have been killed in shootings.
While armed men and women thronged the capital’s streets, gun-control advocates mostly stayed away.
Some gun rights supporters at the rally said they had always planned to carry out a peaceful demonstration, and felt unfairly associated with violence. Teri Horne, 51, of Quitman, Texas, stayed outside the weapons-free area, carrying her rifle. “This is where freedom began, right here, and this is what they’re doing to the people of Virginia,” Ms. Horne said as she pointed at police officers screening demonstrators.
Hours after the pro-gun rally ended, a crowd of about 30 gun control activists, many of them college students, went inside the Capitol grounds. Several of the students, including some who had survived school shootings, drove in from various locations in Virginia and slept at the office of a state legislator, Dan Helmer, on Sunday night.
Since Virginia Democrats took control of the Legislature, they have been racing to make a mark on state policy, and gun control has been atop their agenda. Last week, the State Senate approved three gun control bills that the House of Delegates could approve as early as this week. The measures limit purchases of handguns to one each month; require that gun buyers submit to background checks; and allow local governments to ban guns in parks and public buildings. Mr. Northam has said he would sign the bills.
The group had initially planned to hold a vigil earlier on Monday, but it moved the event to later in the afternoon after reports that white nationalists and militia members would attend the pro-gun rally. The advocates stayed in Mr. Helmer’s office throughout the morning.
But the fates of other limits, including a proposed ban on assault-style rifles, remain uncertain, and the state is still starkly divided on the issue, complicating political choices. In recent weeks, more than 100 municipalities have designated themselves “sanctuaries” for the Second Amendment. Though the measures are purely symbolic, lawmakers and sheriffs in those areas have said they will refuse to enforce new gun control laws.
“We heard them screaming from the office,” said Mollie Davis, 19, who survived a shooting at Great Mills High School in 2018. “That really scared me.”
President Trump, who lost Virginia in the 2016 election despite winning the rural, less populous parts of the state, has repeatedly drawn attention to Virginia’s debate over guns in recent days, warning that state Democrats were threatening Americans’ right to bear arms. On Monday, he wrote about the issue on Twitter, urging people to vote Republican. “I will NEVER allow our great Second Amendment to go unprotected,” he wrote, “not even a little bit!”
Andrew Goddard, a gun control activist, asked the group to have a moment of silence for the thousands of people who have been killed by gun violence. “What would it be like if 10,000 of those people were standing with us and beside and behind us today?” Mr. Goddard said.
At the rally, support for Mr. Trump was apparent amid the banners and flags and shouts of “U.S.A.” A large “Make America Great Again” flag whipped above the crowds that gathered outside the State Capitol perimeter. A bus adorned in pro-Trump posters, including a “Women for Trump” flag and a flag with the president’s head photoshopped on Rambo, occasionally drove past the entrance of the Capitol grounds and was greeted with cheers from the crowd.
Though no incidents were reported at the gun rights rally on Monday, Mr. Goddard said it did not feel peaceful to see so many armed people marching in the streets. “Intimidation is not peaceful.”
Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2008 holding that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, drew roars from the crowd when he read parts of the amendment aloud. The Democrats, he said, “want to make us like Baltimore, Detroit, Venezuela, Chicago!”
He added, “They were looking for someone to scream at and shout at, and we weren’t going to provide that.”
Mr. Heller asked the crowd, “Do we need gun control in Virginia?”
Nupol Kiazolu, 19, the president of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, said she was compelled to attend the vigil for shooting victims “because oftentimes black and brown voices are left out of these issues.” She added, “And we are the people disproportionately affected by this.”
The crowd roared back: “Nooooo!”
One gun-control advocate who did go to the rally on Monday morning to confront pro-gun demonstrators was Paul Karns, 49, a writer from Richmond. Mr. Karns said he had been dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder after he was shot 13 years ago while defending his neighbor during a robbery.
As the rally went on, occasional chants went up: “No confiscation! No registration!”
He got into a heated debate with a pro-gun demonstrator who said schools were vulnerable to violence because of the lack of guns on campus. Mr. Karns yelled and stormed off. “One thing I don’t see from that side of the spectrum is empathy for the rest of us,” he said.
Vinny McMahon, 25, drove to the rally from his home in Maryland. “I don’t think the governor should be telling anyone what to do,” said Mr. McMahon, who brought one of his guns with him. “I want the ability to defend people around me.”
Richmond was alive with activity as early as 6 a.m. as clusters of people made their way toward the Capitol. The traffic downtown included a Jeep flying an American flag, and numerous pickup trucks.
Timothy Williams, Sabrina Tavernise and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported from Richmond, and Sarah Mervosh from New York. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from New York.
Logan Smith, 25, a transmission plant worker from Indianapolis, said he set out Saturday night and drove in his black Dodge Charger for 9 hours and 46 minutes to reach Richmond on Sunday. Standing in a teal sweatshirt in the early-morning cold on Monday, his hands in his pockets, he watched the line for the entrance to the Capitol grounds start to snake around the block.
“I see how it matters — it matters to me back home,” Mr. Smith said of gun rights. Referring to the gun regulations bills before the Virginia Legislature, he said, “Seeing stuff like this being pushed, it doesn’t sit well.”
Support for President Trump was apparent among many of the gun rights activists in attendance.
A large “Make America Great Again” flag whipped above the crowds that gathered outside the State Capitol perimeter. A bus adorned in pro-Trump posters, including a “Women for Trump” flag and a flag with the president’s head photoshopped on Rambo, occasionally drove past the entrance of the Capitol grounds and was greeted with cheers from the crowd.
“Trump 2020, baby!” one man shouted. “Amen,” a man wearing a camouflage hat replied.
Despite concerns about potential violence, which led the governor to declare a state of emergency ahead of the rally, the authorities said they were not aware of any major incidents by late afternoon. The police announced one arrest, of a woman who wore a bandanna to cover her face; it is against the law for adults to wear masks to conceal their identities in public in Virginia.
The Richmond police estimated the crowd size at about 22,000, with 6,000 inside the secure perimeter and 16,000 outside. Organizers had said they expected 120,000 people to attend.
The Virginia Citizens Defense League noted online that it had failed to meet its fund-raising goal. Its website indicated that some 1,200 people had given a total of $71,533 by late afternoon Monday, short of the target of $100,000.
“The real fight is yet to come,” the group said in a Facebook post. “Can you throw a few bucks our way? We are behind in our goal.”
The rally was a frequent topic of discussion on internet platforms that are popular among anti-government militia groups and white supremacists. Many users expressed interest in attending. But over the weekend, white supremacist chat rooms began to overflow with warnings to stay away.
Many suggested that participants were being set up for a government trap where they would either be blamed for any violence that broke out, or would even be the targets of violence themselves.
Those warnings continued on Monday from members of anti-government militias, white supremacists and others who were in Richmond. The message “Don’t go in the cage” was posted repeatedly on Twitter, along with comments like “Flood the rest of Richmond instead.”
For years, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, which falls early in the legislative session, has been a day for ordinary Virginians and advocacy groups to talk with state legislators about issues that concern them, in a tradition known as “Lobby Day.”
This year, gun rights groups made especially big plans, after control of the Legislature flipped in the November election.
After a generation of dominance by Republicans sympathetic to gun rights, the State Senate and House of Delegates are now run by Democrats who want to impose tighter regulations — measures that have become increasingly popular in the state, especially after a gunman fatally shot 12 people last May in Virginia Beach.
The State Senate approved three gun control bills last week that the House of Delegates could approve as early as this week.
The prospect of new laws restricting firearms has met with stiff opposition in the state’s rural areas. Since November, more than 100 municipalities have declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” — a purely symbolic step, but one that highlights the widening rift in Virginia between its cities and its rural areas, which have been losing population and political power for years.
Timothy Williams, Sabrina Tavernise and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported from Richmond, Va., and Sarah Mervosh from New York. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from New York.
