I never knew about Charlie Kirk's existence until he died. I was deeply appalled by the gruesome, cold blooded, fanaticism-driven murder of this young man as he was peacefully debating with people he disagreed with. I felt it personally aggravating that such a brutal violation of the most sacred principle of free speech was committed in the one country that leads the entire planet by the example when it comes to freedom, the reason I love the US so much and look up to it as an example to follow.
The fact Charlie was murdered by someone solely because that someone didn't like what he said should be enough of a reason to trigger outrage on anyone in the US, regardless of their personal political views. And that's simply because this is not about Charlie at all: this was an attack on free speech. This was an attack on everyone, not just Charlie. The message was clear: "say something I don't like, and I will kill you". No society, no civilizational order can develop under such brutal authoritarianism. Forget Charlie, an attack on free speech is an attack on civilization itself.
Yet, horrifyingly enough, so many people celebrated this attack on free speech. No conversation can be held with someone that considers that you should be killed for not sharing their views. So this is not a post to those resentful psychopaths. This is a post to the civilized people out there.
To that people, I just wanted to give a tool against the most repeated slander against Charlie: that he literally said that "some deaths are necessary [sic] to keep our rights to bear arms". The psychopaths then say that "he had it coming" and that "he would have justified this". No he wouldn't, and he was perfectly clear about it. The false quote is a spiteful distortion taken from a clip of one of his TPUSA live events, on April 5, 2023. Yet if you make it through that first layer to see what the true quote was during that event, you will find a second maliciously calculated layer of distortion in which, despite getting the actual quote, all over the internet there's only that one clip to be found, completely out of context, in order to still frame it like if that's what he meant.
So for the peace of mind of those who defend free speech, so that you're able to disable that false argument when it comes at you, I took the job to find the full interview and the full excerpt. You will find in it that in the way he frames what he says, he makes the point perfectly clear, which is nowhere close to what the ill-intentioned media articles say.
Full Excerpt (full event audio below):
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?
Full Event Audio Record (the quoted excerpt starts exactly at 38:54):