There was something eerie and insulting about the thousands of gun-toting lobbyists who packed the area around Capitol Square on Monday to demand that Virginia lawmakers not step on their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

While we have great respect for the U.S. Constitution, particularly the First Amendment’s right to free speech and peaceable assembly, we found it offensive and disrespectful that gun rights advocates from across Virginia and the nation felt compelled to use the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to make their views known.

Dr. King, a peacemaker, was the personification of nonviolence, yet he is one of the world’s best known victims of gun violence. His life was cut short at age 39 by an assassin’s bullet in April 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., where he had gone to support city sanitation workers who were striking to eliminate dangerous working conditions and to boost their wages.

Many of the 16,000 demonstrators who were outside of Monday’s no-gun zone at the Capitol were armed and openly carried a dangerous array of weapons — military-style rifles, hunting rifles, shotguns, 9mm handguns, small caliber pistols and even a .50-caliber sniper rifle. Some of their shouts, chants, signs and props carried veiled, and not-so-veiled threats of what they will do if their gun rights are abridged; a guillotine was erected on Ninth Street just down from the Capitol and the state Supreme Court building.

While, fortunately, no violent incidents broke out, we don’t see anything peaceful about large crowds of people carrying guns. Their presence and message Monday was meant to intimidate — to strike fear in people, organizations and state lawmakers who back common sense gun safety proposals, such as background checks before all gun purchases, limiting handgun purchases to one a month, banning assault-style weapons and allowing local governments to ban guns in parks and public buildings.

These basic proposals, which are aimed at curbing the spate of violence and gun deaths in our communities, workplaces, schools, churches and synagogues and homes, are favored by a majority of Virginians, according to a December poll conducted by the Center for Public Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs.

But organizations, including Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, Everytown for Gun Safety and some groups hosting tributes to Dr. King, called off their efforts planned for Monday out of fear of possible violent clashes with the armed groups that took over Downtown. Bracing for white supremacists and other extremist groups who reportedly planned to attend the rally, many right-minded people simply stayed away from Downtown.

Gov. Ralph S. Northam also appropriately placed a temporary ban on weapons inside Capitol Square during the days surrounding the gun rights rally. We believe such a ban in that public space should be made permanent.

The FBI also last week arrested six people associated with the Base, a white extremist, anti-government group aiming to start a race war. Three of the men, authorities said, had weapons and discussed attending the rally.

We believe there is a way for gun rights advocates to make their point without their brazen intimidation tactics, including donning militia-style clothing and parading around with assault-style weapons.

We also were offended by some of the signs the gun-toters carried, chiefly “Gun control is Jim Crow” and “MLK Believed in the 2nd Amendment.”

While there were few black faces in the crowd, we have seen no evidence that the gun rights groups understand or even care about the horrific violence perpetrated against African-Americans during the Jim Crow era or the threats and traumas suffered by Dr. King and thousands of others — black people and white people — during the Civil Rights Movement to spur our nation to a more just and equitable place.

For gun advocates to appropriate Dr. King’s life and message of nonviolence to support their right to bear arms is a clear indication they know little about Dr. King.

It is true that Dr. King applied for a concealed weapon permit in Alabama in 1956 but was turned down by local law enforcement authorities. His application was made after his home was firebombed in January 1956 by segregationists in retaliation for the successful bus boycott he led in Montgomery to end segregated seating on public transportation.

In the face of that violence and threats on his life and that of his wife and young children, Dr. King’s associates and unofficial bodyguards armed themselves to protect him, his family and themselves.

People also forget that Dr. King was stabbed at age 29 by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in September 1958 in Harlem where he was autographing copies of his memoir, “Stride Toward Freedom,” about the yearlong bus boycott.

The National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates fail to examine Dr. King’s life beyond his request for a weapon for self-protection. If anything, that violent act against Dr. King by Izola Ware Curry, who later was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent the rest of her life in a series of psychiatric hospitals, residential care facilities and a nursing home until her death in 2015, underscores the need for “red flag” laws sought by Virginia’s Democratic lawmakers to prohibit a person from purchasing, possessing or transferring a firearm if he or she poses “a substantial risk of injury to himself or others.”

Sadly, many of the gun rights advocates at Monday’s rally oppose the legislation, viewing it as a way for the state to confiscate their weapons.

While we believe in the power of transformation, we have no idea what could transform the thinking and positions of many of the rally-goers when it comes to gun safety laws.

Dr. King went through a transformation when it came to weapons and his personal safety. By 1963 when he was arrested during concerted civil rights efforts in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. King had wholeheartedly embraced the philosophy of nonviolence. Any type of violence — weapons and physically fighting back—was eschewed, even in the face of assaults by police using billy clubs, dogs and fire hoses against children and young adults.

That philosophy of nonviolence caused a strain among people in the movement, but garnered worldwide attention and support for civil rights efforts.

In “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.,” a collection of Dr. King’s speeches and writings edited by Dr. Clayborne Carson, founding director of Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, and published in 2001, Dr. King discussed how he gave up guns.

“I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house,” he wrote. “When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face to face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid.”

Maybe if the thousands of demonstrators who flooded Capitol Square on the King holiday advocating for unlimited gun rights truly examine Dr. King’s life, there would be real peace in the Commonwealth.