Kirk on the Second Amendment
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For anyone that is interested in the FULL quote made by Charlie Kirk that is being taken so out of context, I have it here and if you’re willing to read it, you may have a different opinion.
“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?”
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Most people using the quote to dunk on him are just using it as a get out of empathy free card. According to those people, anybody who thinks guns should be legal, even if it does increase possibilities of random violence, gets no grace if they are victims.
Meanwhile, Kirk's point is a valid and reasonable one, and would not disqualify him from his own right to personal safety, in the mind of anybody with any moral credibility.
I was never much familiar with Kirk, but so far, the dunks trying to paint him as a raving lunatic have been unpersuasive. For a guy with as many thousands of hours of tape out there, I assume he was pretty good at finding reasonable but third-rail perspectives and demonstrating that they can be argued in good faith. Nothing pisses off the midwit left more than that. Clearly, what he was doing was working. I wish the best to his organization as it moves forward from this.
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For me he was one of those myriad political influencers that I never paid attention to except for when one of his clips went viral. Since 9/10 such clips have been of him making nice conversation with people who disagreed with him. Prior to 9/10 they were of him OWNING or DESTORYING the libs.
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For me he was one of those myriad political influencers that I never paid attention to except for when one of his clips went viral. Since 9/10 such clips have been of him making nice conversation with people who disagreed with him. Prior to 9/10 they were of him OWNING or DESTORYING the libs.
@jon-nyc said in Kirk on the Second Amendment:
For me he was one of those myriad political influencers that I never paid attention to except for when one of his clips went viral. Since 9/10 such clips have been of him making nice conversation with people who disagreed with him. Prior to 9/10 they were of him OWNING or DESTORYING the libs.
One can "own" or "destroy" via civil conversation. In fact, that can be the most viral way to do it. Jordan Peterson's ascent was based mostly on that.
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Yes, I did not really ever hear of him. I think my connection to him, though I did not know it was him, was the meme's that people would post here with "Prove me wrong" line. I did not know the original story behind that or who the guy was.
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Yes, I did not really ever hear of him. I think my connection to him, though I did not know it was him, was the meme's that people would post here with "Prove me wrong" line. I did not know the original story behind that or who the guy was.
I’d never heard of him until last Wednesday afternoon.
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I’d never heard of him until last Wednesday afternoon.
@Renauda said in Kirk on the Second Amendment:
I’d never heard of him until last Wednesday afternoon.
One week ago, Turning Point had 900 college chapters. Since the assassination? They’ve received 32,000 chapter requests.
His Social Media accounts have received over 3,000,000 new followers, and all of the videos of his debates and speeches are getting unreal viewership numbers… And many people’s opinions about him are changing about Kirk and his stances compared to the characterization of him and his views.
Way to shut him up, Tyler…
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I’d never heard of him until last Wednesday afternoon.
@Renauda said in Kirk on the Second Amendment:
I’d never heard of him until last Wednesday afternoon.
I vaguely knew the name but I had no real idea who he was. There's a bunch of these people I hear about from time to time, mostly from other people praising or complaining about them.
Obviously it's an awful tragedy for his family, but I've been struck by how many people I know on Facebook who are commenting on this monumental event who I suspect also had no idea who he was before last week.
I was only joking
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@Renauda said in Kirk on the Second Amendment:
I’d never heard of him until last Wednesday afternoon.
I vaguely knew the name but I had no real idea who he was. There's a bunch of these people I hear about from time to time, mostly from other people praising or complaining about them.
Obviously it's an awful tragedy for his family, but I've been struck by how many people I know on Facebook who are commenting on this monumental event who I suspect also had no idea who he was before last week.
I do admit though that in when I saw a picture of his face posted in the news, it was immediately familiar. No idea from when or from what source. It was just familiar. Possible that he was on an interview or member of a panel discussion I watched sometime in the past number of years.
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@Renauda said in Kirk on the Second Amendment:
I’d never heard of him until last Wednesday afternoon.
I vaguely knew the name but I had no real idea who he was. There's a bunch of these people I hear about from time to time, mostly from other people praising or complaining about them.
Obviously it's an awful tragedy for his family, but I've been struck by how many people I know on Facebook who are commenting on this monumental event who I suspect also had no idea who he was before last week.
