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Across the country, the Utah Gun Exchange is reportedly following students who are seeking new gun regulations after 17 folks were murdered at a Florida high school in February. It circled back to their home state Saturday, when the national group March for Our Lives came to Sandy, Utah. (Weapons checks were necessary like you would see at an airport or court.)

Yeah, they’re following children.

That’s weird.

Yet Bryan Melchior, co-owner of the Utah Gun Exchange, says he does not apologize for attending March for Our Lives events, the organization’s reported method of following the students.

“People say is it insensitive that you show up at these events?” Melchior told The Salt Lake Tribune. “What’s insensitive is the ability to go out there and promote, send this message that would seek to deprive people of their civil rights.”

But Elizabeth Love, one of the organizers of March for Our Lives SLC said, “If they think the best thing to do for their brand and image is to follow a group of teenagers whose schools were shot up,” Love said, “then that’s their decision.”

The UGE’s intensity caused Megaplex Theatres, a major movie theater chain in Utah, to call off hosting the MFOL event, reported The Salt Lake Tribune.

Whether the theater should have done that is debatable. But how are we to excuse the UGE?

Melchoir and his own followers traveling across the United States in this pursuit surely could at least find better things to do.

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Then again, perhaps this is job security at least for Melchior, making his actions even sicker. Sometimes, it truly isn’t about the bottom line.

(Melchior has had a checkered business past in an industry that does not relate to guns, having been sued by a nuclear waste company where he was the vice president of sales, KSL reported.)

UGE’s effort hasn’t been incident-free, only adding to the problems with UGE’s quest, as if that was necessary.

And yet, Melchior doesn’t apologize.

Utah Gun Exchange, what will it take for you to apologize for following children? Let alone to stop doing it?

Why do gun activists’ values apparently rank like this?

And at what point does following children across the country become stalking?

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Photo courtesy of the author.