The assassination of Charlie Kirk has opened the door for a lot of people to try and score a "gotcha" against pro-gun folks. Kirk, who was also pro-gun, vehemently defended the Second Amendment many times in his debates with college students. He was one of us.
Since his murder, though, one particular bit of a quote keeps coming up, something Kirk said.
I came across it earlier today, with this op-ed from a college student publication.
In a case of tragic irony, Kirk was outspoken about his support for gun ownership and the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment: the right to keep and bear arms. When asked the best way to defend the Second Amendment at a Turning Point event in 2023, Kirk said in his response:
“You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry, and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I […] think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
In 2023 alone, there were 15,186 victims of gun homicide in the U.S., forming a gun homicide rate of 4.42 per 100,000 people, making it the sixth highest in the world.
The data is clear: the U.S. sees more than just “some” gun deaths.
Now, let's focus first on the quote. Yes, Kirk said that.
However, here's the entire argument from Kirk's own mouth:
He starts by noting that cars kill a whole lot more people. Vehicular fatalities happen far more than so-called gun deaths, and yet, as Kirk points out, no one is saying we should ban driving because of that fact.
In fact, most people who advocate for banning driving do so not because of some public safety argument--they know that won't work--but from an environmental standpoint. They argue that privately owned vehicles and their use make climate change worse, and they use that argument.
No one is calling for a ban on driving because of safety. As Kirk notes, as a society, we've decided the freedom to travel as we wish is worth the toll.
Then he notes that the so-called gun deaths are worth it if we value liberty, particularly gun liberty.
That's the part these people keep leaving out. In this particular author's defense, the link he used also omits this part of the discussion, so it's possible he was unaware of it, but most of the other people who keep repeating this know better. They, at least, know how to look it up. It's not hard to find. It took me about five seconds on YouTube to dig it up.
Charlie Kirk made a perfectly valid argument about the cost of liberty, and did so by using a particular liberty no one wants to restrict that results in far more fatalities each year, most of which are not because of someone's decision to end their own life, something that keeps being lumped in with so-called gun deaths each year.
Kirk cites 50,000 or so auto fatalities. 2023 only saw about 40,000, but that's far more than the 15,186 gun homicide victims the author cites, yet we still don't blink about cars. There are no background checks for vehicular ownership. There's no psych evaluation for owning a car. There's nothing to stop you from getting a car right now if you've got the money, even if you have a dozen DUIs and a vehicular manslaughter conviction. Sure, you can't drive legally without a license, but people manage that all the time.
Liberty and safety aren't necessarily opposing forces, but they also can't co-exist in a perfect state of either. Liberty is risky and dangerous. Our Founding Fathers knew that.
Charlie Kirk knew that.
This isn't a gotcha. This is nothing but a pathetic reach to take his argument completely out of context and make it look ironic that he was killed by someone who shot him. However, when you look at the totality, you'd see that Kirk knew that bad things could happen, including to him and his, but he saw freedom as being worth the risk.
I'm sick of people ignoring the whole of the argument just to try and score a cheap political point.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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