A man wearing a Donald Trump shirt and carrying a gun stood outside a voting location in Virginia Friday — and authorities here are not calling it voter intimidation.
A witness told the Huffington Post that as she approached the voting station, the man offered her a Republican sample ballot, which she declined. He was still standing outside the office in the sidewalk when she left.
“I had my 9-year-old son with me. I felt intimidated,” Erika Cotti said. “And I had to explain to my 9-year-old why a man with a 357 magnum is standing outside the polling station.”
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“He’s like, ‘Who are you going to vote for, crooked Hillary?’ And I was like, that’s really none of your business.”
But because Virginia is an open carry state, meaning you can carry a gun in full display in public, law enforcement say that he is officially not doing anything wrong.
“They said that there’s nothing they could do, that he was well within his rights to be carrying his weapon,” Judy Brown, Loudoun County registrar, told the Post. The man was eventually convinced to hide his weapon, but Cotti does not think it’s enough:
“We’re an open carry state, I get that. But he’s wearing a huge Trump T-shirt, he has a huge gun, and he was obstructing my exit on public property,” Cotti said. “That’s insane to me.”