By Dave Workman |Senior Editor
When an estimated 22,000 Second Amendment activists converged on the capitol campus in Richmond, Virginia without any problems or injuries, following what amounted to several days of hysteria on the part of anti-gun Gov. Ralph Northam, it was a story nobody expected, perhaps except for the organizers.
In the aftermath, published reports say the gun rights group cleaned up after themselves and left Richmond streets around the capitol much cleaner than they had been for months.
Indeed, the rally was so uneventful the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms called on Northam to apologize to gun owners for essentially demonizing them and suspending their rights days before the rally. The governor had actually declared a temporary weapons ban in Capitol Square around the legislative building.
According to The Hill, many of the thousands who marched through Richmond streets were visibly armed with sidearms or semi-auto rifles.
“Lobby Day” event drew several speakers and legions of angry gun owners who were there to send a message to the General Assembly: No more gun control.
Gun owners had been wrongly associated with a white supremacy movement, another effort to demonize them especially on the annual Martin Luther King Day observance.
“Gov. Northam should beg forgiveness from every Virginia resident his Chicken Little drama both offended and demonized over the past several days,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “How many more thousands of Virginia citizens did not attend Monday’s peaceful rally because of the governor’s alarmist rhetoric about possible violence.”
He said all Northam and the Richmond Democrats did was kick a hornet’s nest.
“Today’s huge turnout in Richmond, and last Friday’s rally in Olympia, Washington sent a message that America’s law-abiding firearms owners are not about to just go quietly in the night,” Gottlieb observed.
According to Reuters, Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League—the group that organized the annual rally—said people are looking at what is happening in Virginia since Democrats too control of the legislature, and they are concerned the same thing could happen in their states.
Northam’s anti-gun-rights agenda includes resurrecting the one-handgun-per-month law, banning so-called “assault weapons,” requiring “universal background checks on all firearm transactions and adoption of a “red flag” law.
Activists carried all manner of signs, some laced with sarcasm. One Asian woman held a sign that read, “Do I Look Like a White Supremacist to you?” Another read, “Gun Rights Are Also Gay Rights—Gays for the 2nd Amendment.” A third was simply covering all the bases: “I Want Gay Married Couples to be Able to Protect Their Marijuana Plants with Guns.”
It was a racially diverse crowd, and even some Grayson County Sheriff’s Deputies were seen holding a banner that read, “We Support the Second Amendment.”
Nearly all of the state’s 95 counties have declared themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuaries,” a move that has left Northam and other Democrats promising to pass several gun control laws, anyway.
While security for the rally was heavy, it did not turn out to be necessary.
“Northam’s paranoid emergency disarmament order ignored years of peaceful tradition and treated Commonwealth gun owners as common criminals,” Gottlieb said. “How many more thousands of Virginia citizens did not attend Monday’s peaceful rally because of the governor’s alarmist rhetoric about possible violence?”
Some network news coverage seemed to avoid showing the full extent of the crowd. It was massive, spreading around the block with an estimated 16,000 mostly armed citizens jamming streets near the capitol.
“Ralph Northam owes his citizens an apology,” Gottlieb insisted. “His gun-hating hysteria has spawned a remarkable Second Amendment Sanctuary movement that we support and hope to see expand in the months ahead. Grassroots gun enthusiasts are fed up. We are tired of being treated like second-class citizens because we defend the Second Amendment that Northam would like to destroy.”
Democrats, with Northam on point, began talking about gun control last November on the day after the legislative elections gave them the majority in the General Assembly. They have been throwing proposals at Commonwealth gun owners for more than two months leading up to the Martin Luther King Day rally.
Last November, only about 40 percent of Virginia voters returned ballots. The result was a loss of leadership for Republicans. Several people are suggesting on social media that will never happen again.
