Only history will tell us whether the massive gun-rights rally that ended peaceably Monday afternoon was part of the drama of self-government or of social dissolution. Police estimated that 22,000 people attended to protest against proposed gun-rights legislation—well short of the 50,000 organizers predicted, but still an impressive turnout. The life of the city was thoroughly disrupted with street closures and security checkpoints. A few days before, Governor Ralph Northam, reacting to threats on the internet, had declared a state of emergency, banned all weapons from the square, and surrounded the protest area with metal fencing to control entry and exit.

On Monday, hundreds of protesters stood outside the designated protest area with the weapons they fear the Virginia General Assembly will limit. Their presence underscores the many contradictions of this strange and ominous event.

To begin with, of course, the celebration of firearms took place on the 35th celebration of the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (within that lies the contradiction that the Commonwealth of Virginia until 2000 tried to use the same day to honor King and the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson). King’s gift to the national conversation was a commitment to nonviolence, and his life was ended by an assassin with a firearm. Second, the day of the march had come to be known in Virginia as Lobby Day, a day on which citizens could gather in the square and, in the words of the First Amendment, “peaceably assemble, and … petition the government for redress of grievances.”

That, in one sense, was what many of the protesters in Richmond Monday were doing—politics in the purest sense, as they registered their opposition to planned gun-control legislation pending before the Virginia legislature. That opposition was one they have every right to feel and to express. This was, at one level, pure democratic politics.

But note who was not in Capitol Square on Monday. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence had also planned to assemble and petition for gun-control legislation—as it had done in peaceful competition with gun-rights groups in previous years. This year, because of the threats of armed violence surrounding the gun-rights march, that gun-control demonstration had to be canceled. The delegate from Manassas, Lee Carter, the South’s only socialist legislator, went into hiding because of death threats. Carter had not, in fact, sponsored an anti-gun measure, but gun-rights groups spread disinformation on the internet that he had done so; his life—and his ability to function as a legislator—was endangered.

One group’s politics canceled those of others, in other words. Self-government in a democratic society is supposed to follow a model of openness—different ideas and points of view compete in a “marketplace of ideas” for the support of the people and their representatives. That model doesn’t work when one side kills the other, or even threatens to.