Brush With Grateness: GQ Paints the Peaceful Virginia 2A Rally as Nazi Death Squads Holding the City at Gunpoint

Where I come from, there are lots of Nazis. You see them goose-stepping at Walmart.

A lot of the same people were in Virginia Monday.

Oh, wait — sorry. For a moment there, I got gun rights advocates confused with Nazis.

It must’ve been that GQ article I read.

An op-ed for the men’s magazine compared protestors of the state Democratic legislature’s gun control measures to palm-raising fans of small, square mustaches and race-based genocide.

The article includes a photo of rifles used to form a swastika:

I wrote about Monday’s rally in Richmond, and how thousands of armed men holding a city at gunpoint is hardly a “peaceful” event: https://t.co/H1vcjHJEZn

— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) January 22, 2020

It seems the columnist might tend to have the topic on the brain — she posted to social media an announcement of her upcoming book, which touted “‘a mouthy Jewish broad from New York’ and her encounters with the byzantine online world of white supremacists, tracing the movement’s growth, schisms, and the threat it poses to the 2020 election…”

Here’s how she characterized the protest:

Just outside the legions of police barricades, [thousands] of people roamed the streets of Richmond bearing a bristling mass of rifles, from AR-15s to massive Barrett sniper rifles. Some wore skull masks; others waved Confederate flags. Members of hate groups like the League of the South and the American Guard, as well as the Proud Boys, mingled openly; some of the latter were wearing patches that said “RWDS”—an acronym for “Right-Wing Death Squad.”

I wasn’t there; but is that a bullseye synopsis of Monday?

The Daily Wire offered a very different portrayal:

The media tried to claim that the event was going to be attended by angry white conservative men and that violence was likely to break out, neither of which materialized.

Members of the LGBT community, Democrats, and gay rights supporters attended the event, declaring that “Gun Rights Are Gay Rights.”

The black community showed up in large numbers in support gun rights, a fact that went widely under-reported by the media.

One black Second Amendment supporter told Breitbart News: “I do not support in any way, shape, or form Governor Northam’s and the Democrats’ gun control.

Other videos on social media showed black Americans expressing anger at the media for lying about the event and for hoping that bad things would have happened at the rally so they could push an agenda.

Prior to the rally, I myself wrote that some badness was likely — but only due to the planned attendance of Antifa (here).

Thankfully, nothing materialized.

Maybe that’s because everyone was too scared.

To hear GQ tell it, a bunch of maniacs held the city at gunpoint:

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.

Maybe to someone from the Big City, the idea of a bunch of gun owners is a holy terror.

But where I grew up, we just call that “community.”

And hey, wait — I just remembered: I live in the Big City, too.

Oh, well. Different strokes.

This is probably enough to give some people one:

Gentleman’s Quarterly certainly didn’t like it; and all that “menace”:

Monday was a day of a clenched fist raised in menace; rather than be lulled by the temporary absence of bloodshed, Americans would do better to be poised for the inevitable falling of the blow.