A young high schooler, “a volunteer with Students Demand Action” and “MFOL Chicago Organizer,” wrote a column the other day in support of gun control.
I know my voice is not the most important. Yet, I am at the meetings, the rallies, and the summits for a reason. It is to hear the survivors, and it is to expand on my perspective. The world won’t change if we don’t listen to each other, if we don’t have tough conversations, and if we don’t vote. Don’t wait until it’s your school, family, or neighborhood to fight this fight. Too many have.
As I have done before, I contacted Ava Uditsky with an offer to pen a column for The Zelman Partisans; to reach an audience that might otherwise be inaccessible to her, a chance to persuade us to her way of thinking. Specifically,:
Ms. Uditsky,
Good afternoon.
I ran across your column, “What I’ve Learned As A Teen Gun Reform Activist,” July 11, 2018, and wanted to offer you an opportunity to pen another, to reach — and perhaps even persuade — an audience you might not normally reach.
I am with The Zelman Partisans (http://zelmanpartisans.com/), a Jewish pro-RKBA group. As you would expect, we generally oppose gun control laws as violating rights as well as being ineffective. I am giving you a chance to state your positions and policies, including how you would implement effective laws, with an eye towards swaying our readers and members to your point of view.
Ideally, we would learn something from you, and you could benefit from our knowledge and opinions, as well.
I can assure you that our readers tend to be polite and knowledgeable in comments, and the occasional drive-by troll attempting personal attacks is dealt with swiftly, since that is rude — at best — and not conducive to an honest exchange of ideas.
You can contact me at bussjaeger@zelmanpartisans.com regarding this matter.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Carl “Bear” Bussjaeger
Writer, The Zelman Partisans
zelmanpartisans.com
She declined.
Thank you for the opportunity. However, I feel that although I would absolutely love and appreciate the opportunity to have a productive exchange of ideas with your readers, the site is not the right place for me to do so. I would not feel comfortable placing my name and image in a place that I feel has inappropriately attacked Fr. Pfleger. In addition, I do not feel that the questioning of Mr. Hogg’s graduation status was appropriate either.
I believe the reference to Father “Snuffy” Pfleger is this column, in which it is mentioned that Pfleger called for political opponents to be “snuffed out.” I do not believe TZP has addressed Hogg’s graduation status, so it’s likely she refers to a post on my own — unrelated — personal blog. I’m flattered that she researched me.
This makes it appear that Miss Uditsky wishes to align herself with a man who calls for the elimination of his opponents, and thinks it inappropriate to question the legal status of a person calling for more laws for everyone else. I hope she’ll reconsider both.
While I hoped Miss Uditsky would write something for us, based on past experience, I didn’t hold out a great deal of hope. Gun controllers seem to prefer echo chambers and allied media outlets. (In contrast, TZP’s weekly newsletter always includes news of the victim disarming factions, and I have offered many — fact-based — columns to such outlets… all of which have been declined. Declined… declined… declined…)
Amusingly, that very same day, Ava Uditsky retweeted this:
A key goal of March For Our Lives is to engage with people who disagree with us in order to educate the misinformed.
Perhaps a key goal of March For Rights Violations is “to pretend we’re willing to engage, to look better to ill-informed supporters, while avoiding real engagements which would inevitably prove us wrong.”
Carl is an unpaid TZP volunteer. If you found this post useful, please consider dropping something in his tip jar. He could use the money, what with truck repairs and recurring bills.
Gee, I guess my questions for her would have been along the lines of her “feelings” and “impressions” (because facts don’t matter) of Father “Snuffy” using ARMED body guards and the Political Pawns such as #MoneyHogg and the student groups having armed body guards. Why do the “feel” their lives are more valuable than the rest of us. How do the students afford to pay the bodyguards who certainly don’t come cheap. Are there other people she feels it is acceptable to publicly express a desire to kill, and how does she choose. What is her criteria?
My original goal was simply to give her a chance to define her thoughts by challenging our conceptions. When trying to look up contact infor for her, I learned a few things. She’s quite young, and might have something in common with TZP readers. That further inclined me to be gentle with her as I suspect she simply hasn’t been exposed to much in the way of opposing views.
When she declined to participate, citing Pfleger and Hogg, I offered her a few questions. To think about privately, not to answer to us.
Maybe she will. Maybe she’ll even look up more data independently.
We can hope. If she knows how to think independently she might. But if she’s aligned with the Hoggs, and “Snuffy’s” her handlers shouldn’t have a hard time stopping that. Because independent thinking certainly doesn’t seem to be what public schools these days attempt to foster.
Those are great questions you gave her, I really do hope she will ponder on them. Who knows, maybe even see the light.