Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump supporter and founder of Turning Point USA, was shot during a speech at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Wedneday. The conservative activist was seated in a tent, speaking at an event when a shot hit him in the neck, videos circulating online showed.
He was rushed away to the hospital, and President Donald Trump on Truth Social shared that Kirk had died.
“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!,” the President said.
While Republicans and Democrats alike have condemned the political violence and expressed concern for Kirk, his old statements on the second amendment and gun deaths have surfaced.
What Charlie Kirk said about gun deaths
In 2023, in the wake of the shooting at Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee – which claimed the lives of three children and three adults – Kirk said that gun deaths in exchange for the preservation of Second Amendment Rights is a part of America’s reality.
“Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty…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,” Kirk had said.
He had continued, “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 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.”
On school shootings, Kirk had said “…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?”
Shot while speaking of mass shootings
Kirk, on Wednesday, was shot just as he was answering a question on mass shootings. “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?,” he was asked, videos circulating online show.
“Counting or not counting gang violence?”, Kirk responded, before he was shot.
