How Can We Address Gun Deaths *and* Government Overreach?

An invitation to debate Charlie Kirk's statement on gun deaths and the Second Amendment.

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, social media has been flooded with condemnations of his statement about gun deaths and the Second Amendment - with some folks even suggesting that he would have supported his own death, and therefore, they weren’t that sad about what happened to him (or at least not as sad as they would have been about another person’s death).

Now, to review, his full quote was as follows:

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.

There’s actually a lot contained within that statement.

He’s grappling with a problem that comes up in so many areas of public policy: that having a certain policy would likely result in deaths or other awful outcomes, but NOT having it would also likely result in deaths or other awful outcomes - yet in a different way.

(Seatbelt laws are one such example. In some cases of accidents and crashes, wearing a seatbelt actually makes you MORE likely to die - yet in the majority of scenarios, it protects you. So we accept the trade-off and have seatbelt laws, recognizing that they save more lives than they take. And I don’t believe that means we “support” or are “okay with” the deaths that they do cause.)

I couldn’t help but notice that in the majority of cases where someone was objecting to this statement by Charlie, they acted as if the wrongness of it was self-evident - rather than actually demonstrating why it was wrong, or offering an alternative line of reasoning.

I personally am interested in having a healthy debate about this statement - as I know the Second Amendment was created to help citizens protect their rights and lives in the event of a vast government overreach (among other reasons), yet we obviously also need to address the issue of innocent people dying.

I don’t have an exact solution to how to balance these two issues, but I’m interested in getting deeper into this subject to make my own small contribution to creating one.

Here are some questions that I’d like to ask those who disagree with Charlie’s statement (and even those who agree, or aren’t entirely sure what they think of it).

I hope they’ll be a good start to creating dialogue around this:

Do you believe there’s a possibility that the U.S. government could ever become tyrannical (taking away basic rights such as freedom of religion, speech, association, peaceable assembly, etc.)? Why or why not?

In the event that this does happen, what do you think we should do? Should we defend our rights? If so, how? With guns or with some other method? What other method do you propose?

Do you think that innocent lives could be lost in the event of a vast government overreach (whether citizens possessed guns or not)? If so, approximately how many (in each scenario)? Do you think it would be more or less than the number of innocent people currently killed by guns? How would you suggest creating a policy to balance these two things?

What is your stance on private gun ownership? Do you not believe in it at all? Do you believe in it with restrictions? Which one(s)?

Do you think that even the knowledge that an armed citizenry exists might deter the government from going too far with certain things? Why or why not? (I’m reminded of a friend of mine who’s a police officer, who often says that the mere presence of a taser and the implied threat of using it tends to make someone calm down and de-escalates a situation.)

What’s the status of foundational freedoms like speech/assembly/religion in countries that don’t have something like the Second Amendment? Do you think these two things are connected at all? Why or why not?

Do you believe it’s possible to have private gun ownership while simultaneously having zero gun deaths of innocent people? If yes, how would that work? If no, does that mean that you “support” or are “okay with” the deaths that do occur, or do you use different concepts to frame your stance on it?

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I’m asking these questions in good faith, and am hoping for good-faith answers. I don’t currently have a highly precise stance on guns, though I do join overwhelming majorities of Americans in supporting basic gun control/restrictions.

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