Just days before the Lobby Day rally in Richmond, Virginia, a group of individuals was arrested. These men were members of a racist extremist group called The Base. There was much talk about their plans for Lobby Day, enough so that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam had all the excuse he needed to step up security at the capitol.

Now, those men have pleaded not guilty to the charges facing them.

Three men accused of being members of a violent white supremacist group called The Base pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges in a federal indictment in Maryland.

Former Canadian Armed Forces reservist Patrik Mathews, 27; and Brian Mark Lemley Jr., 33, of Elkton, Maryland; entered their pleas during separate arraignments on charges including transporting a firearm and ammunition with the intent to commit a felony.

William Garfield Bilbrough IV, a 19-year-old pizza delivery driver who lived with his grandmother in Denton, Maryland, before his arrest, pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to “transport and harbor certain aliens.”

In a court filing, Justice Department prosecutors said Lemley and Mathews discussed “the planning of violence” at a gun rights rally in Richmond, Virginia, in January. A closed-circuit television camera and microphone installed by investigators in a Delaware home captured Mathews talking about the Virginia rally as a “boundless” opportunity, prosecutors said.

“And the thing is you’ve got tons of guys who … should be radicalized enough to know that all you gotta do is start making things go wrong and if Virginia can spiral out to … full blown civil war,” he said.

While the anti-gun left wants to paint us with the same brush as these guys, there’s something important to remember. Gun rights activists were their targets.

Their plan was to open fire into the crowd, eliciting the armed activists to return fire. They hoped to create enough confusion to spark off a civil war, but they wanted to start it by killing our people.

These are not our friends. They’re not our allies. They’re nothing but scum who can’t see beyond skin color.

Northam’s response may have been a lot of things, and I’m not about to defend him against jack squat, but there had been a threat. The problem is, the threat wasn’t against lawmakers or public officials. The threat was against gun rights activists who these three turdnuggets allegedly believed were so eager for a civil war that they’d just start shooting the moment bullets flew.

I think, had they carried out their attack, they’d have been in for a rude awakening.

You see, based on that quote above, they seemed to believe that being prepared for war somehow meant not only were people eager for it but would also side with racist nutjobs like these three. The truth of the matter is, most of us don’t give a damn about a person’s race, but the quality of their character.

Not only that, though, but we’re also all trained to not shoot blindly, to identify our targets as threats first. They could have opened fire, but I suspect they wouldn’t have survived to see sundown. The confusion they hoped to create wouldn’t have gone down like they planned.

But while the anti-gun left continues to try and pretend those are “our” people, it’s important to remind them that we weren’t their allies, but their targets.