BELLEVUE, WA – Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam should apologize to the thousands of gun owners who turned out Monday for their annual, and peaceful, Second Amendment rally, and to the thousands more his hysteria kept away, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

“Following a peaceful gathering of law-abiding gun owners protesting the gun control extremism of Northam and his Democrat colleagues in the General Assembly,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb,” Gov. Northam should beg forgiveness from every Virginia resident his Chicken Little drama both offended and demonized over the past several days.

“Northam’s paranoid emergency disarmament order ignored years of peaceful tradition and treated Commonwealth gun owners as common criminals,” he continued. “It appears to us that his true motive was not public safety, but discouraging as many angry Virginia grassroots activists as he could from participating in Monday’s rally.

“How many more thousands of Virginia citizens did not attend Monday’s peaceful rally because of the governor’s alarmist rhetoric about possible violence,” Gottlieb wondered. “We will likely never know the answer, but what we do know is that this anti-rights governor and his Democrat cronies now in control of the Assembly are worried about the hornet’s nest their gun control crusade has kicked repeatedly since the November election.

“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,” he observed. “After months of demonization by Democrat presidential candidates, and a winter’s worth of gun control threats from Virginia’s new Democrat majority, the wrath of citizen activists has been sparked.

“Ralph Northam owes his citizens an apology,” Gottlieb stated. “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.”