On Monday, itself the sea of armed men kept the city in a kind of artificial stillness—not safety but fear. There is a difference between peace that consists of calm and security, and the false peace of being held under threat. One may be silent when held at gunpoint, but it is not the silence of contentment; it is the silence of mortal terror.
Reporter friends who planned to attend the event went in with a sense of dread, a war-zone fatalism at what might happen. Molly Conger, a Virginia-based leftist activist and citizen journalist, told me that she had cautioned other activists to stay far from the capital and avoid counterprotest. She attended, she told me, because she felt an obligation to document the event, rather than to protest it. “I still think it was the right thing to do,” she told me Tuesday, of her decision to warn other activists away. “I would be distraught if I had the power to keep people away and didn’t and they died in a mass shooting.” At the event, she said, “the crowd was so thick I got knocked in the face and chest with rifle barrels.”
The effects on locals amounted to a sweeping petrification. Due to Monday’s event, Richmond natives closed their businesses downtown—from a 7-11 near the Capitol to a barbershop to the entirety of Virginia Commonwealth University, which suspended all activities for the day, including internships and clinical placements; a university statement made clear that this was in response to the threat, not the federal holiday. NBC reported that some residents of Jackson Ward, a historically black neighborhood in the city, left town entirely for the day—which was Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Due to the state of emergency declared by the governor, legislative business slowed to a crawl; nonessential personnel stayed away from the capitol. So did other political groups that had planned to lobby the legislature on Monday, part of a “Lobby Days” tradition that dates back decades. The Northern Virginia Association for the Deaf had planned to lobby the legislature in support of a bill that would require movie theaters to include captions. Its president, Maryrose Gonzalez, told me they’d stayed home to avoid “getting caught up with the gun people.”
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, a group that had hosted a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Richmond for 28 years, canceled its vigil. “Advocates have faced armed individuals trying to intimidate us each year,” wrote the group’s president, Lori Haas, in a press release. “But this year is different; we have received information that heavily armed white supremacists will be seeking to incite violence, and our organization has decided that the safety of our volunteers, advocates, and staff, many of whom are survivors of gun violence, must be our top priority.”
An annual, long-planned march for the rights of undocumented Virginians, coordinated by New Virginia Majority, an advocacy group for working-class Black and Brown Virginians, was cancelled on the Friday before the gun lobby group. Ibby Han, a representative of the organization Virginia Student Power, which had partnered in the MLK Jr. Day event since 2015, told me that the New Virginia Majority event had expected around 1,000 attendees, many of whom were undocumented. The advocacy event was centered around drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants and criminal justice reform. “We are enraged,” the organization wrote, “that we cannot use our voices today at the General Assembly.”
That the zeal of armed activists should crush the rights of others to advocate is neither novel nor unexpected, for all their loudly proclaimed adoration of “freedom.” Americans weary of mass shootings at malls, churches, kindergartens, concerts, nightclubs, abortion clinics, hospitals, universities, and movie theaters—in short, in any place where people gather—have long pointed out that the fear marring any movement through the commons constitutes an infringment of the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. We speak the names of towns that have become synonymous with mass shootings like a litany, a kaddish for the dead. This state of affairs is enforced by a minority that is both well-heeled and well-armed. As if to underscore the point, the NRA handed out 1,000 free 30-round magazines to gun owners before the rally. The event on Monday served the only possible purpose thousands of armed men gathering en masse can serve: it served as a threat, in this case against democracy itself.