Charlie Kirk, the political commentator who was killed Wednesday in Utah, had maintained that preserving gun ownership rights is worth losing people in shootings. Kirk addressed the tradeoff at an organizational event for his Turning Point USA in 2023, Newsweek reported at the time, saying that a country with an armed populace can't expect to not have killings by gunfire. "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 said, per Media Matters for America. "That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe."
He likened the situation to the national bargain over cars. "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," Kirk said. "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." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted nearly 47,000 gun-related deaths in the US in 2023, per the Pew Research Center.
Guns overtook car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers in 2020, per CNN, and have not lost the top spot.
After the shooting at a church school in Minneapolis last month, Kirk said people wanting to transition medically to another sex shouldn't be allowed to own a firearm, per the Minnesota Star Tribune; police identified the killer as a transgender person. "Was the shooter on hormone therapy? Was he on SSRIs [antidepressants]?" Kirk said, per Le Monde. "We deserve to know."
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