“These threats are real—as ev­i­denced by re­ports of neo-Nazis ar­rested this morn­ing af­ter dis­cussing plans to head to Rich­mond with firearms,” the gov­er­nor said Thurs­day.

Cit­ing wor­ries about vi­o­lence, a lo­cal branch of the Coali­tion to Stop Gun Vi­o­lence said it can­celled its own gath­er­ing at the Vir­ginia state­house, which had been planned for later Mon­day.

“We are an or­ga­ni­za­tion that strives to pro­mote pub­lic health and safety, and we can­not in good faith lead our sup­port­ers—some of whom are chil­dren and teenagers—into a violent, dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion,” said Lori Haas, the coali­tion’s Vir­ginia di­rec­tor. “We refuse to en­gage with those who seek to phys­i­cally harm us.”

Of­fi­cials with Gun Own­ers of Amer­ica, which is help­ing or­ga­nize Mon­day’s pro-gun rally, said the vast ma­jor­ity of its mem­bers are law-abid­ing and that ral­ly­go­ers should be able to carry guns in case ex­trem­ists tried to cause may­hem.

“If there’s one place a crazy mur­derer is not go­ing to choose to start shoot­ing, it will be Capi­tol Square in Rich­mond on Mon­day,” said Michael Ham­mond, GOA’s leg­isla­tive coun­sel. “He un­der­stands be­fore he has fired his sec­ond shot he him­self will be dead. That’s as­sum­ing peo­ple can be armed. If the gov­er­nor chooses to turn 20, 50, 100,000 peo­ple into sit­ting ducks so they can be mowed down by a crazy killer, that’s blood on his hands.”

The six men ar­rested this week are mem­bers of the Base, ac­cord­ing to court doc­u­ments. Mem­bers use en­crypted on­line chat rooms to dis­cuss ways to make im­pro­vised ex­plo­sive de­vices and vi­o­lence against African-Amer­i­cans and Jew­ish-Amer­i­cans, a Fed­eral Bu­reau of In­ves­ti­gation spe­cial agent said in court pa­pers.

The Base was founded in or around July 2018 for the pur­pose of unit­ing white na­tion­al­ists, and its lead­er­ship en­cour­ages mem­bers to meet in per­son and en­gage in mil­i­tary train­ing to pre­pare for vi­o­lent in­sur­gency against var­i­ous tar­gets, in­clud­ing the U.S. gov­ern­ment, court doc­u­ments said.