Friday's vote by a House of Delegates committee to kill a bill to close the "gun show loophole" won't deter protesters who have planned a lie-in on the Capitol lawn Monday.

"The battle has just begun," protest organizer Abigail Spangler said Friday after hearing of the committee's action. She accused Virginia gun rights legislators of pushing the bill through to a vote before advocates for tougher gun laws could speak about it. She held out hope for a similar bill in the Senate that she expects will be voted on Monday, when protesters will be out in force.

Monday's planned activities include a legislative briefing, meetings with legislators and a vigil at 1 p.m. at the Capitol's bell tower. That will be followed by the lie-in, organized by Spangler's group, ProtestEasyGuns.com. The group has inspired dozens of lie-ins across the country, which consist of 32 people in black lying down to symbolize the number of people at Virginia Tech killed by shooter Seung-Hui Cho before he killed himself on April 16.

Monday's lie-in will not be limited to 32 people, Spangler said. Tech students, families of victims and people wounded that day are expected to attend.

The mother of two from Alexandria organized the first such protest in her hometown April 22, less than a week after the shootings.

"I was just outraged, completely outraged as a mother that all these folks had lost their children," she said.

Spangler began organizing other lie-ins and the movement gained momentum on the Internet through social networking sites and the ProtestEasyGuns Web site. Families of victims soon became involved.

"I feel like I've lost everything, and I'm not doing this for me," said Omar Samaha, a Tech alumnus whose sister Reema was killed in the shootings. "I'm doing this so that other people won't have to go through the same thing that we did. I wish this on no one."

Samaha plans to attend Monday's protest, which organizers have dubbed "Advocacy Day at the Capitol." It's sponsored by the Virginia Center for Public Safety, ProtestEasyGuns.com and the Virginia chapters of the Million Mom March, and is expected to involve hundreds of people from across the state who say tougher gun laws can save lives and help prevent a repeat of the April 16 shootings.

Despite Friday's vote, Spangler said the top priority of the protest remains changing state law that allows unlicensed vendors to sell firearms without conducting computerized criminal records checks on buyers -- the so-called loophole. A 1991 state law requiring instant background checks applies only to licensed dealers.

Cho was able to purchase firearms from licensed dealers because authorities had not entered information about his mental illness into the federal database used for instant records checks. Two weeks after the shootings, Gov. Tim Kaine issued an executive order requiring the names of all people involuntarily committed to receive mental health treatment to be entered into the database. The General Assembly likely will pass legislation making Kaine's order permanent.

But a panel that investigated the Tech shootings noted that Cho could have avoided a background check by purchasing weapons from an unlicensed seller at a gun show. It recommended changing the law to prevent that scenario.

Randa Samaha, Reema's sister and a University of Virginia student, spoke at a lie-in in Charlottesville in October. She's helping organize a bus that will take protesters from Charlottesville to Richmond on Monday. Andy Goddard and Suzanne Grimes, parents of students wounded in the shootings, will speak at the protest.

Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was wounded on April 16, said she wants the legislators who voted against the bill to explain their actions to her on Monday.

"All it is is a background check. It's unfortunate that people that are voted into office can't understand it," she said. "It's upsetting for innocent people whether they're owners or they're not gun owners."

Omar Samaha is working with the Rev. Catherine Snyder, Presbyterian campus minister at Virginia Tech, to bus people from Blacksburg to Richmond.

Snyder did not know anyone killed on April 16, but she knows someone who was injured and knows people who lost loved ones that day.

"In this community, the degrees of separation are very small," she said. "I think our community has suffered beyond words, and I want to work so that other communities will not suffer as we have."

Not everyone affected by the shootings is on the same side of the gun debate.

Tech graduate student Ken Stanton lost a friend on April 16 and said he often thinks about what might have happened if there had been someone in Norris Hall other than Cho who had a gun that day.

Stanton, Tech's campus leader for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, plans to be in Richmond on Monday with about 20 other Tech students. They and other SCCC students from Virginia will be lobbying for laws that would force public universities to allow people with permits to be armed on campus.

"We just want to allow people to have the same rights as they do everywhere else," he said.