A patriotic group of Bay State residents and veterans who will lead a rolling rally around Gillette Stadium ahead of today’s game between the New England Patriots and Carolina Panthers in response to NFL players kneeling during the national anthem say they’re just looking to bring people together.

“It’s going to be very pro-America and not anti-anything,” said U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Joe Abasciano, who helped organize the rally. “We’re not going there to disrupt anybody or anything. We’re just going to roll by. We’ve done a lot of charity rides in the past and we just wanted to do something positive.”

Abasciano, who completed two tours in Iraq over his five years of active duty, said he also “had the solemn honor of doing a lot of funerals at Arlington National Cemetery” and helped organize the event for local residents who wanted to “share what the American flag means to us.”

“Most of us are veterans or supporters of veterans. We’ve been very active in the wounded veteran community and Gold Star Family communities and we pooled our resources from past events,” he said. “We kind of asked ourselves, ‘What are we good at?’ and this is it.”

Abasciano said participants are going to meet at American Legion Post 106 on South Main Street in Sharon and lead a rolling rally of trucks, motorcycles and cars with American flags around the stadium in Foxboro before returning to the post for an event that will coincide with the national anthem at Gillette.

“Our goal is to be back at the legion post about the same time that they’re doing the national anthem in the stadium,” Abasciano said, adding that local singer Shanna Jackson will be singing for the post and a local Gold Star father will serve as the event’s keynote speaker.

Fellow organizer Tim Shea, who sits on the board of Boston’s Wounded Vet Run, said participants simply want to “take the anthem back.”

“We want to remove the politics from it,” he said. “This started as a reaction to what happened last week with the Patriots and the other teams but evolved into something bigger. We’re not going to bash the Patriots, we’re not going to burn their jerseys. Hopefully fans will see us go by and realize people do care about the anthem, people do care about the flag and the military and Gold Star Families and first responders. It’s not a protest, it’s positive.”