1ºChris Jennings
Full quote for context
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?
2ºI am not anti gun and I am not anti Second Amendment. But we have to admit the truth that access to guns is one of the biggest problems in this country. It is so easy for anyone to get one and if someone is unstable whether it is politics, family, relationships, or mental illness they can cause chaos in society.
But here is the flip side. If you make it harder for people to access guns then when a tyrannical government comes along like the one we have now under Trump we leave ourselves defenseless. That is the double edged sword. Damned if you do damned if you don't.
3ºScott WS If we’re being honest about what’s driving gun violence, let’s look at the facts instead of blaming schools:
Mass Shooters (U.S., 1997–2025):
Gender: ~98% male, ~2% female
Race: ~52% White, ~21% Black, ~8% Latino, ~6% Asian, ~4% Middle Eastern, ~2% Native American
Average Age: 34
Transgender: <1%
School Shooters:
Gender: ~95–96% male, ~4–5% female
Race: White shooters are the majority; Black and other races account for fewer cases
Age: Median 16, ~70% under 18
Relationship to School: ~50% current/former students, ~12% unrelated
The data clearly shows that the vast majority of both mass shooters and school shooters are young to middle-aged males, predominantly white, with a tiny fraction being transgender. Pointing fingers at schools “radicalizing” kids doesn’t line up with the actual patterns—access to guns and mental health issues are the bigger factors.
4ºLuis Moran but these people are all young. These people aren’t 50-60 years old. These are young kids that have been lied to tell them they are girls and filling them with hormones that they have no business taking. And the parents need to be held accountable now as well even if the person is now an adult cause this didn’t happen at 18. This was years of abuse physical and mental abuse. They need to have less gun laws so the GOOD people with guns can be there to stop them. Say you knew someone who likes to steal cars, you think they go to a gated community or one that is outside by the road? Same with gun laws. They know the soft target areas so that’s where they attack. Last few church shootings that they had under cover security guards what happened? Good guy stopped bad guy. Carry where you can and keep your head on a swivel.
5ºMonty Gorman I know why,
“[Black women like] Joy Reid, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Shiela Jackson Lee, and Michelle Obama... used affirmative action because they do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously... so they had to steal a white person's slot."He said it was a "huge mistake" to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964, “Jewish money" for ruining American culture, gay people are "destructive" and endorsed having them put to death, “the 2nd amendment is worth the cost of "some gun deaths" if he had a daughterthat was raped hed force her to have the baby. Christian Nationalist= no rights for women, people of color or gays.
6ºMonty Gorman He was the man who argued that “some gun deaths are worth paying the price to protect the Second Amendment.”
He was the one who trivialized school massacres while the arms business boomed.
American progressivism responded firmly: it totally condemned violence, even against those who sowed hatred their entire lives. Because, as Mrs Caraballo said, “entering a spiral of violence only fuels chaos and gives the far right excuses for further repression.”
The irony is brutal: Kirk is killed by the very weapon he glorified.
Also he was the man that never undertood the word EMPATHY but today: I as a lot of USA citizens we have EMPATHY for his wife and kids. The EMPATHY that he never had for family of the Minnesota congresswoman, for the kids who have been killed in the schools massacres, the thousands of people that every year are shooting in USA and for their families. I hope you can rest in peace and never again a person be shooting in the USA.
7ºRafael Garcia you keep trying to deflect but you can’t rebut my argument, it’s not the guns, it’s the people.
“Our Constitution was written solely for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.”
John Adams
We no longer are a moral and religious people. Look how many people on this comment page are celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk for example. Or who lamented the fact that the shooter in Pennsylvania missed President Trump. Or are holding up Luigi Mangione as a hero. It isn’t the guns, we’ve always had plenty of those in this country, it’s the people.
8ºSick country with sick people holding guns and shooting at anyone that simply pisses them off.
THAT is an amendment right?
Where is the right for those killed to live out their natural lives?
It's always about the boys and a good number of girls' right to bear arms. That guns don't kill....people do!
Well they do! We know it! We see it! Just how long are you going to be sucking that lollipop?
I would rather not have that right if it meant people would be safe from gun violence. How losing the population of an entire town is okay to gun enthusiasts is beyond comprehension! No morals, no ethics, no values for family and society.
9ºRafael Garcia We already have pretty much all the gun laws that won't affect the second amendment. We already have to fill out forms and go to background checks to buy one. Which of your other rights do you have to fill out forms and pass background checks to exercise? What we need are better mental health options and the ability to hospitalize people who are a danger to themselves and others and refuse to take their medication like the man who slaughtered that poor woman on the train a couple days ago. That man should have been in a mental facility for life.
10ºthe evil ones are the ones blaming groups of people instead of the one who pulled the trigger. We don’t even know who did it yet. I’m tired of the selective rage. Calling Dems the violent ones is just ignorance because the stats do say otherwise. Even trump did it he said it was leftists fault. No it was the fault of the nut who pulled the trigger. Attacking Dems and left is hypocrisy when in the same sentence he says they are against the free speech and attacking someone for their politics. Yeah blaming this on ALL people that don’t share your views yeah that’s attacking people for their political view dude. Just stop. If you need to mourn do so, but don’t lash out. It is now 9/11. A day we as a nation said we would never forget it’s more important than ever that we have some dang unity again. No more violence especially towards each other.