The truth about Charlie and the right to bear arms:
Plenty of Charlie Kirk haters are saying he deserved to be shot, and other quite ugly things. Some of these folks have said he brought this upon himself because, among other things, he was a keen defender of the Second Amendment. Three main things need to be said in this regard.
One, most of these leftist loons do not know anything about what the Constitutional right to carry firearms even means. So let me start by letting them know what the Second Amendment actually says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Two, many are happily sharing a one-line quote from Kirk, fully pulling it out of its quite long context: “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment”. They say this with glee, blaming Kirk got what he advocated for.
Baloney. The full context of his remark is of course needed here. Kirk said it in a Q&A session during an April 5, 2023, TPUSA Faith event that took place on the Salt Lake City campus of Awaken Church. Here it is in full:
AUDIENCE QUESTION: How’s it going, Charlie? I’m Austin. I just had a question related to Second Amendment rights. We saw the shooting that happened recently and a lot of people are upset. But, I’m seeing people argue for the other side that they want to take our Second Amendment rights away. How do we convince them that it’s important to have the right to defend ourselves and all that good stuff?
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it’s a great question. Thank you. So, I’m a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don’t know, because I actually speak my mind.
The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — “wow, that’s radical, Charlie, I don’t know about that” — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you’ve not read any 20th-century history. You’re just living in Narnia. By the way, if you’re actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you’re living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don’t know what alternative universe you’re living in. You just don’t want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.
Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That’s a price. You get rid of driving, you’d have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.
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 am, I, I — 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. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.
So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don’t know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That’s why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there’s not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there’s all these guns. Because everyone’s armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?
As can be seen, simply having his complete remark in full helps to make sense of it all.
Three, all the usual suspects on the left are again calling for the elimination of the right for Americans to own firearms. They claim Kirk would still be here if we had strict gun control. One thing can quickly be said about this: I notice that when Trump was almost killed in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024 there did not seem to be ANY lefties and Dems screaming for the banning of guns.
But in a more detailed response, an important article recently appeared dealing with this matter. Dace Potas, an opinion columnist for USA TODAY looks at this particular quote by Kirk, and looks at the broader matter of whether more gun control would have kept him alive. While the entire piece is not all that long, here is part of what he wrote:
I’ve seen countless instances of the following Kirk quote circulating online: “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,” Kirk once said in an interview.
These words have been plastered on social media platforms by gun control advocates following his death, amassing hundreds of thousands of shares and likes. The implication is that Kirk deserves what happened to him, or that it is the result of policies he advocated for, and thus, he should be grieved less.
Kirk’s words are obviously right to anybody who supports the Second Amendment, but even if I disagreed, I would have the basic decency not to treat his death as an “I told you so” moment. It is utterly repulsive that some people itch to use an assassination as a moment to claim victory in a political debate.
Nor do I think that Kirk, who cofounded Turning Point USA, would disagree with that statement, even knowing what would eventually happen to him. The tricky thing about being a principled person is that people eventually will use those principles against you when something adversely impacts you.
He continues:
I must mention the unified front that elected Democrats have had in condemning this horrific action, and it deserves praise. However, there have been some issues. Plenty have used this as a chance to advocate for their own preferred sets of gun control policy, way before we have any of the facts on the ground.
“I don’t think a single person who has dedicated their entire career to preventing gun safety legislation from getting passed in this House has any right to blame anybody else but themselves for what is happening,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, on Sept. 11.
I understand Ocasio-Cortez’s instinct to turn around the situation on Republicans, who are saying her party had a role in prompting the shooting, but she is still wrong to do so. There is no set of gun control proposals that would have saved Kirk. A coward with a bolt action rifle took a single shot from up to 200 yards away?
Previous Democratic gun control proposals have targeted so-called assault weapons, chiefly the AR-15. The type of weapon used to kill Kirk is precisely the type of weapon that gun control advocates have insisted they don’t want to take.
Short of a blanket ban on all firearms, I’m not sure what kind of legislation anyone thinks might have prevented this tragedy. Those who claim Kirk’s death was because of inadequate gun control show their true face. They don’t support nuanced gun restrictions or even the removal of certain guns from society. The truth is that they want them all gone, and they have no problem using a young father’s death to advance that position.
Nothing has made me angrier than seeing reactions blaming Kirk for the fact that a waste of space killed him while he had no opportunity to defend himself. It is sickening that some can’t set aside their political obsessions for a day to grieve the violent, senseless death of a young husband and father. Shame on AOC and the others who have done so. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/09/11/charlie-kirk-shooting-quote-gun-violence/86099835007/
As I keep saying in my article about Kirk (this is now my fourth piece), please keep his family in your prayers. And like Charlie, keep proclaiming truth in love in a world of lies and hate.
Thanks Bill. Nicely done
Thanks Gerrit.