I'm wondering when you are flying out to cover a rally where you know a lot of people are going to be armed,

how do you prepare? So I've been covering gun politics in the United States for like seven years now.

So being around a lot of people with guns, that doesn't scare me because I do that all the time.

And nothing bad has ever happened to me.

Lois Beckett covers gun politics and gun violence for The Guardian.

In a lot of her writing, she's trying to convince whoever's reading to check their bias when it comes to guns.

Lois herself, she's pretty comfortable around a firearm.

Yeah, I mean, I like first shot a gun with a friend, a really close friend, many years ago, even before I started writing about guns.

And, you know, I've gone shooting periodically since, often with friends.

It really frustrates me to see coverage of the gun debate in America that's just ignorant or dismissive of this consumer product that's just pretty normal in America.

There are like two things that are true about having 300 or 400 million guns in America.

And one is that you get evidence of that people are really dumb and they do dumb things and they get hurt and other people get hurt.

But it's also true that like for the most part people are just a lot less dumb than we think they are.

So when Lois was getting ready to go to Richmond, Virginia last week, to cover a massive gun rally at the state capital.

She wasn't nervous. Not exactly. The guns weren't the thing that were freaking me out when I was flying out to Virginia.

It was the conspiracy theories.

That was what was scary.

Mixed in with the Second Amendment diehards, Lois was expecting to run into neo-Nazis,

white supremacists, Holocaust deniers.

So the morning of that protest, Lois woke up before dawn, went outside, tried to get a sense of the mood.

By the time the sun rose, the streets were already packed. People are standing shoulder to

shoulder in these couple of streets around the Capitol Square in Richmond. And that makes people

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