A composite image of Ted Cruz in the Senate and ALyssa Milano speaking to the ACLU.

What on Earth Are Alyssa Milano & Ted Cruz Hoping to Get Out of a Gun Control Debate?

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Ted Cruz and Alyssa Milano have agreed to meet for a conversation on gun regulation, which is not a sentence I expected to ever type.

The two had a heated back-and-forth on Twitter this week, after Milano responded to a tweet from Texas Rep. Matt Schaefer in which he decried “so-called gun-control solutions” as being able to protect people. Later in the same thread he seemed to say that the only thing that can protect people is prayer so that doesn’t really seem like a person worth engaging with, but to each their own.

Cruz jumped in to tone police her in a very lengthy thread.

She responded by saying she’d “love to come in and meet with [him] on the gun issue and many other issues that include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In response to Cruz citing a quote from Exodus about self-defense, she also said she’d like to talk about 1 Peter 4:8: “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”

Over the course of a few more tweets, they seem to have set a date for their meeting, which will take place in Washington DC on Tuesday of next week. Milano suggested live streaming it but I sure hope that doesn’t happen. Because if they want to talk, fine–good for them! But it’s hard to imagine this actually helping to “resolve the discord in our Nation.”

It sounds like they’re approaching this as a conversation, not a debate, which is good because if this were a debate, it would be hard to understand how Milano thinks this is a good idea. Ted Cruz may not be a person anyone would describe as “intelligent”–for example:

But not knowing that climate change affects more than beachfront properties is different from being a trained debater, which Cruz is.

But maybe this really won’t be a debate. Maybe it will just be an open and honest dialogue about the concerns of two opposing views in the national conversation around gun regulations. (No part of me believes that’s what will happen, but let’s just say what if!) If that’s the case, then this really affects absolutely no one but the two people involved. There are a lot of headlines and Twitter conversations framing this as some sort of liberal vs conservative showdown but honestly, are either of these the fighters their side would have chosen?

Ted Cruz is notoriously loathed by his own party. Alyssa Milano is very politically active and has started some interesting and important conversations online but she’s also said some completely bananas things in the same spirit and is in no way a representative of anyone but herself.

If this doesn’t end with Ted Cruz changing Milano’s mind on guns (which he won’t), it will just highlight the feeling many gun control activists have that conservatives can’t be reasoned with. And if she doesn’t change his mind (which she won’t), conservatives are going to run with headlines about her getting owned by the worst the Republican Party has to offer. It’s lose/lose.

In the end, hopefully this will just end up being the story of two people who sat in a room together and had a miserable time in private and absolutely nothing else.

(image: Drew Angerer, Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

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Author
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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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