In the seven years since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, pressure on lawmakers by a surging gun-control movement has resulted in the passage of hundreds of new gun-safety laws. Momentum to regulate guns accelerated again after the shooting, almost two years ago, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, which marked the end of what might be called the “thoughts and prayers” era. In the months since Parkland, more than thirty states and the District of Columbia signed gun-safety bills into law. Virginia, the home of the National Rifle Association, was an exception. Last spring, after a mass shooting at a municipal building in Virginia Beach, Republicans voted down a proposed slate of gun-control bills in an emergency legislative session that lasted less than ninety minutes.
In November, Democrats won control of the Virginia general assembly for the first time in more than two decades, after campaigning heavily on gun-control measures, including universal background checks, an assault-rifle ban, and “red flag” laws that allow authorities to temporarily confiscate weapons from a person who poses a threat. Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun-control group founded by Michael Bloomberg, spent two and a half million dollars in Virginia in 2019, eight times more than the National Rifle Association.
Virginia is a polarized state, with a dense liberal population in Richmond, the Washington suburbs, and around its universities, and a conservative majority in its rural areas. In the weeks after the election, a backlash began. Dozens of counties and municipalities declared themselves gun-rights “sanctuaries,” language lifted from the immigrant-rights movement. The gun-rights group known as the Virginia Citizens Defense League tripled in size, from eight thousand to twenty-four thousand members, and called for gun-rights activists to rally on January 20th, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, in Richmond. The holiday is known as Lobby Day in Virginia, when citizens roam the halls of the Pocahontas State Office Building and speak with their legislators about their concerns. V.C.D.L. has attended Lobby Day since 2002, and in recent years has drawn a few hundred members. This year, fear began to grow among government officials that the ranks of the activists would include people intent on violence. Groups promoting Lobby Day included the anti-government militia organizations the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters; Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist and founder of InfoWars; and several organizers of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in August, 2017. Online, people threatened violence. Accelerationist neo-Nazis described the occasion as a possible spark to a second Civil War. On January 15th, the state’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, declared a temporary state of emergency, banning all weapons on capitol grounds. On January 16th, the F.B.I. arrested three members of the white-supremacist group the Base who were allegedly heading to Richmond for Lobby Day with hundreds of rounds of ammunition. As news of the arrests spread, the V.C.D.L. announced that several militias had “graciously” offered to provide security, but that the group would rely on the police, “not to mention enough citizens armed with handguns to take over a modern mid-sized country.” The gun-rights groups that planned to attend were both touting how safe the event would be and preparing for it as if for a battle. As unprecedented as the protest was, it was happening because the gun-rights movement had lost its foothold in a purple state. A disaster would ruin them. A success might offer a template for gun-rights activism in Virginia and around the country.
On the evening of Sunday, January 19th, the V.C.D.L. gathered for its annual pre-Lobby Day dinner, at the Hibachi Sushi and Supreme Buffet, inside the Westland strip mall. There were steam tables, a koi pond beneath painted murals, prawns glistening under heat lamps, sweet-and-sour sauces, stainless-steel vats of quivering jello, and weapons in holsters. In a back room, the gun-rights activists ate from plates piled with egg rolls, breaded shrimp, lo mein, peanut brittle, pineapple, and French fries. The dinner, which is usually a local affair, had the feeling of a national banquet. There were supportive state legislators visiting from North Carolina and activists who had driven from as far away as Missouri and Florida. “These are normal American people, not fringe, racist haters,” Pam Liner, from Morven, Georgia, told me. Liner sells livestock for a living and has a special affection for donkeys, which she delivers to customers up and down the East Coast. She heard about the rally on television and decided to come by herself; her friends were too scared to join her.
As a representative of the New York liberal media, I was treated with suspicion, but most people were eager enough to present guns as fun, friendly, and safe that they overcame their reservations. I was told that, although the Democrats won in the most recent state elections, their success does not reflect the will of the people. They won because voter turnout was low, because a Virginia judge had ordered redistricting, because Michael Bloomberg had flooded the airwaves with anti-gun propaganda. Bloomberg was second only to Northam as the villain of the day. “You aren’t from Bloomberg, are you?” one woman asked me, when she learned I was a reporter.
Virginia, a state with a pro-gun tradition now on the brink of passing gun restrictions, is, according to the activists, “the canary in the coal mine.” I was told that the problem with the universal-background-checks bill is that it would become difficult to transfer a gun to your family members. (In fact, the proposed law makes exceptions for immediate family members, antique firearms, and situations where the transfer is “necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.”) The problem with red-flag laws, which allow authorities to remove guns from people they deem dangerous, was a low evidentiary standard that would be used as a tool of oppression in order to accuse people of “all kinds of things.”
Drawn-out hypothetical scenarios about home invasions, armed robberies, and government takeovers abounded. These discussions often were infused with paternalism, as gun owners played the role of the benevolent protector whom I would one day come to thank. I was told to look at Venezuela, at Hong Kong, at the Uighurs in China. I was told that you can only implement socialism by disarming the people. “Whether anti-gun people know it or not, one day they will be under the thumb of the government, and we’re trying to prevent that from happening,” a man named Charles Eades told me. He wore a T-shirt that read “My Governor Is an Idiot” and a “Make America Great Again” hat and carried his baby daughter, who looked around the room sweetly and grabbed at my pen as I took notes.
In another part of town, at a brewery, members of a subreddit called r/VAGuns were hosting a meet-up I.R.L. It was a markedly different crowd—fit young men dressed in tactical-casual 5.11 outerwear (the Patagonia of law enforcement) and drinking craft beer. The moderator of the subreddit, a young man named Austin, described it as “just normal guys hanging out the same way as it was in the seventeen-hundreds.” He told me that the media liked to portray gun supporters as “old crusty men with beards,” but that “some of my best friends in the firearms community are first-generation immigrants, they’re transgender, they’re minorities, they’re vegans, they’re Buddhists.” I asked if any of those friends were at the bar that night. “Not a whole lot of people are able to drop what they’re doing and drive across the state,” he said. “I’m here for them.”
The comparison of Lobby Day to the Unite the Right rally had understandably rankled the people I’d met. I heard the Three Percenters, a militia whose members had guarded the Unite the Right demonstrators, dismissed as “drug dealers and criminals.” At the brewery, a group of three recent graduates of the Virginia Military Institute insisted that they were not extremists. “Let it be known that we are separate from the white nationalists and the Antifa,” a young man in a plaid flannel shirt, who had the beard of a mountain man and a gentlemanly Southern drawl, told me. “Let it be known we’re patriots in all senses of the word.”
“He’s black,” another said, pointing at a third friend. The friend raised his eyebrows. “Well, he’s mixed.”
“We condemn all of that.”
“We want peace. We want this to be a peaceful event.”
People were talking about how peaceful the day would surely be while also discussing tourniquets. Austin, the subreddit moderator, told me that he was an E.M.T. and would be on hand should something happen. A conspiracy theory was circulating that if there were violent people at the rally they would be left-wing plants wearing N.R.A. T-shirts and MAGA hats. It seemed like an attempt to hedge responsibility, should anything go wrong.
Monday dawned cold. In the early morning darkness, the capitol building glowed white atop its hill. By seven o’clock, the line to get into the fenced area, where demonstrators had to be unarmed, was already long. Across the street, armed demonstrators gathered, many of them bearing assault rifles and wearing tactical gear. A group held up an enormous banner with an illustration of an AR-15 and the words “Come and Take It.” Buses rolled past bearing visitors from out of town. An R.V. festooned with Trump signs drove by to applause from some in the crowd.
I followed a group of V.C.D.L. members up to the fourth floor of the Pocahontas Building. As the elevator doors opened, I was surprised to see a small group of young people wearing blue March for Our Lives T-shirts. It turned out that the group had spent the night in the offices of sympathetic congresspeople, so that they could participate in Lobby Day without having to risk confrontation with the armed demonstrators. Michael McCabe, a seventeen-year-old from Fairfax, was the only high-school student in attendance. “I’m the only one whose parents were all right with me coming,” he told me. He was supported by Ryan Deitsch, a co-founder of March for Our Lives and a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, and Nupol Kiazolu, the president of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, whose father was killed by gun violence and who was present, as a high-school student, at the counter-protests to the Unite the Right rally, in 2017.
In the hushed beige halls of the Pocahontas building, it was possible to believe that everything was normal. V.C.D.L. members met with legislators in polite, organized teams. Outside, an estimated twenty-two thousand people gathered. Helmeted men who would blend into marshes, deserts, or jungles stood against the buildings, laden with clips of ammo, gas masks, radios, sidearms, flashlights, and pepper spray. Heavily armed packs of men distinguished themselves with different colors of tape tied around their members’ upper arms—one group had orange, another ripped pieces of yellow police tape. One group, some of its members holding rifles, processed behind a color guard to the recorded sounds of a military fife. The scariest pseudo-military getups got the kind of photographic attention that the most outrageous drag queens get at a Pride parade. Rallygoers posed for photos with a guy lugging around a five-foot-long .50-calibre sniper rifle. Virginia’s anti-masking law, a legacy of Klan rallies, was widely disobeyed. I noticed a demonstrator wearing tiny camo running shorts, a Baja shirt—the kind favored by hacky-sack players—over his body armor, and a helmet. He had an unkempt beard and carried an assault rifle. I asked about the shorts. “Just trying to lighten the mood,” he said with a smile. Nearby, a group of friends stood bopping their heads to Lil Wayne.
There was no center to the rally, and no single “face” of it. The claim that it was a gathering of extremists could be countered by the fact of unarmed lobbyists visiting their representatives and the six thousand unarmed people who gathered on the inside of the fence. The claim that it was “safe” or “peaceful” was belied by the barely suppressed atmosphere of fear and the poses of intimidation taken by the armed and masked members of militias. The most typical attendee was white, male, and conservative, but a small group of Black Panthers attracted the attention of social-media posters, who were seeking evidence that the gun-rights movement didn’t have a race problem. The claim that the movement was not racist was belied by the open presence of racists—Proud Boys in yellow sweatshirts, Alex Jones ranting from the top hatch of his black armored truck, and far-right Internet personalities, including the neo-Nazi Jovi Val. There were scattered references to Trump’s campaign for reëlection, but most people did not declare their party affiliation in their clothes or signs. I met a woman from outside of Newport News, Virginia, who is against gun regulation but for universal health care. She lamented how hard it was to find anyone to vote for.
It could have gone wrong so easily. There could have been a firecracker, a fistfight, or an outlier with murderous intentions. But the day passed without anyone getting hurt, which seemed like a statement less about firearms than about a collective commitment to order and discipline. Many conversations left me with the impression of an organized public-relations campaign. “Everyone is treating you cordially, right?” a nice man with an AR-15 said when I approached him to chat. Those who chose to stay away from the rally saw things differently. “I was appalled by the individuals in the press who called it peaceful,” Michael Jones, a Richmond city councilman and a gun owner who supports the proposed laws, said. “My friends don’t walk towards my house brandishing weapons.” He brought up the protester who arrived with a mock guillotine as a particular kind of threat. “In the African-American community, the last thing we want to see is a crowd of white men with guns.”
It was Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, but there were few references to the icon of nonviolence, who was killed by a sniper. Contrary to the beliefs of many at the gun rally, with their “Sic Semper Tyrannis” signs, guns often do not protect Americans from the worst of their government, but tend instead to be turned on the historically oppressed. I saw no memorials to Philando Castile, the gun owner who was murdered by a police officer, or Tamir Rice, the twelve-year-old whom a police officer shot while he played with a gun-shaped toy. In some of the self-styled vigilantes in attendance, I did see echoes of George Zimmerman, who killed the seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin while playing cop. More than one person drew a parallel between the Lobby Day events and the Black Panthers’ armed demonstration on the steps of the California state legislature in 1967, an event that resulted in the Mulford Act, the open-carry ban approved by Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor. The gun-rights movement now uses the Mulford Act as an example of how gun-control laws are disproportionately applied to people of color—one of the few instances of structural inequality that the right will recognize. In its attempts to revamp its image, the movement is now in the somewhat untenable position of claiming to stand for the right to black self-defense while also rallying alongside white nationalists. Without directly addressing the imbalances in power around gun ownership in the United States, the claim that the movement stands for all Americans against tyranny lacks credibility. There’s another way to see what happened to the Panthers, which was that they were mistaken in thinking, as Joan Didion put it in “The White Album,” that “political power began at the end of the barrel of a gun.”
The rally ended at noon. By three in the afternoon, the armed groups had dissipated. As the light faded on the day, a small group of anti-gun protesters, fewer than a dozen in number and including the March for Our Lives youths, came to the capitol steps and held their annual Lobby Day prayer vigil, before a now-empty lawn. After the vigil, I asked Lori Haas, the Virginia state director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, whose daughter was injured in the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, what she had thought of the rally. “I saw a bunch of people from out of state come to chest-thump,” she said. “Guess what? They’re gone. I’ll be here tomorrow. I have an eight-thirty meeting.” On January 24th, seven bills to prevent gun violence passed out of committee. They will be voted on by the Virginia House of Representatives later this week.
