Charlie Kirk Happy To Water Tree Of Liberty With The Blood Of Children

Kinda seems like a tyrant, no?

You know how sometimes, when you're in a particular mood, you think of the absolute most ungenerous interpretation of why someone believes the thing they believe or does the things they do? Like when you see a car a half mile away start speeding up the second you try to take a left turn and think "What? Is this guy trying to cause an accident? Does he want me to die ?"

Well, every time there is one of these shootings, one of the first things I think is, "Shit, these creeps truly do see the lives of these people as a fair price to pay for their ability to own as many stupid guns as they want!" But then I calm down and I tell myself, "No, that's unfair, they're probably not thinking about it in that specific way."

Alas, I am too naïve.

This week, at a Turning Point USA Faith event, Charlie Kirk gave a speech in which he explained, in no uncertain terms, that he is perfectly happy with people dying in mass shootings for his right to bear arms.

Transcript via Media Matters:  

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.

But here's the thing! Car fatalities have been steadily decreasing for years since wearing seat belts became the law of the land and other safety measures have been implemented. And 50,000 people don't, actually, die on the road every year. Car accident fatalities went up during COVID and they still did not reach 50,000.

In 1985, New York became the first state to legally mandate seatbelt use. 

In 2020, there were 38,824 traffic-related deaths in 35,766 fatal car accidents, out of 5 million car accidents in total. The primary reason for these deaths were "driving under the influence, speeding and seatbelt nonuse" — which is why we make all of those things illegal to do.

That same year, there were 45,222 gun deaths. Of those deaths, 4,357 were children and teenagers.

Who does Charlie Kirk think he is that he has any right to volunteer 4,357 of other people's children to be sacrificed at the altar of "Maybe I'll decide to overthrow the government sometime"? There are a lot of things we all might want to do someday, many of which are far more our legal right than overthrowing the governments. Few people would say that the thing they might want to do is worth the lives of 4,357 children. The New York Times reports that at the rate we are going, "one in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations" — and "firearms account for almost half of the increase."

We do all kinds of things to make cars more safe. We require licenses, we require drivers to take tests before they can get those licenses, we have speed limits, we require people to wear seatbelts, we make it illegal to drive while under the influence, we require people who drive cars to be insured and for their cars to be registered, we require car manufacturers to have certain safety features, we do not allow people to put their cars in unsafe places, and we do not allow people to let their children drive their cars unless those children are licensed and insured. We take people's ability to drive away if they are caught using a car under the influence. They are charged more for insurance if they are bad drivers who get into accidents all of the time.

We do none of this for guns. Other countries do many of these things for guns, which is why they don't have mass shootings every other day.

Also, the idea of "reducing" gun deaths by "having more fathers in the home" is ridiculous and not actually a thing anyone can regulate without getting, frankly, tyrannical about it. There are lots of regulations we could have on guns, but we don't have them because some dipshits think they're totally gonna overthrow the United States government. Uvalde had armed guards, and in fact had its own damned police force. Nashville had armed teachers. Neither of these things proved the least bit helpful.

We know what is helpful. We can look at other nations and see what is helpful. Of our peer countries, Canada had the second highest gun death rate for children. You know how many they had? 48 .

If some leader were to somehow rise to power in this nation and demand the sacrifice of 4,357 children, you know what we'd call that? We'd call that tyranny. We are living under the tyranny of selfish, bratty gun humpers who think their ability to own a super cool gun that can kill a dozen people is more important than the futures of 4,357 children.

Maybe we're the ones who need to overthrow them.

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