There is an emotionally charged showdown on the horizon in Salt Lake City as a “pro gun” group plans to show up at the same time and same place as the “March for Our Lives Salt Lake City” event organized by area teens to protest gun violence. Utah Gun Exchange members say they want to support the kids, *but* they can’t sit by and watch these kids make any meaningful reforms to gun laws. From the Salt Lake City Tribune:
The Utah Gun Exchange has announced a counterprotest dubbed March Before Our Lives, which the group planned after members were “excluded” from the original March, Utah Gun Exchange owner Bryan Melchior said.
Melchior said he’d been working with March for Our Lives representatives to join their rally, but his group was asked not to participate because its members’ views on guns don’t align with March for Our Lives’ cause.
“Our purpose for being there is that we care and love our children as well, and originally this march was a march in support of the lives and security of our children,” he said. “It has rapidly deteriorated to an anti-gun protest.”
Madalena McNeil, a representative of the student protest said she tried working with them, but the Utah Gun Exchange wanted to co-sponsor and they couldn’t accept that.
“And it didn’t make a lot of sense, especially because our mission statement says we want to remove military-grade weapons, and that is antithetical to what Utah Gun Exchange believes in,” McNeil said.
McNeil, who has a gun herself, also disagreed with Utah Gun Exchange’s characterization of the March for Our Lives as anti-gun, saying that asking for gun reform isn’t the same as stripping people of their Second Amendment rights.
In fact, the Utah Gun Exchange Facebook page features a cover photo of the group standing beside an armored tank, holding massive high caliber guns, the very guns that have no place in society, the very guns the students and millions more want to see banned in the future.
The ACLU plans to have a team there trained in “deescalation,” but the city officials should be stepping in to move the counter-protest group to a different area entirely. The Utah Gun Exchange counter-protest is little more than intimidation and the group’s 500+ members who’ve RSVP’d for the event are arguing amongst themselves about whether to conceal carry or open carry. The consensus seems to be that they will be conceal carrying handguns, with some discouraging the open carry of AR-15s. Either way, they are arming themselves to a protest about gun violence.