Charlie Kirk Explained the Reality of the Second Amendment

On September 10, 2025, conservative superstar Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Online, people have quoted Charlie as saying:

“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.“

The quote is correct. Charlie said it in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, April 05, 2023. The audio of the event is available online. Charlie’s discussion of the Second Amendment starts about 39:18. Here is a transcript of the Second Amendment comments by Charlie Kirk, TPUSA President:

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 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?

Charlie goes directly to the heart of the leftist argument. An armed society has costs. It also has benefits. Those who wish to disarm the population claim there are no benefits. This is why they attempt to discredit an armed citizenry as a foil against tyrannical governments and why they attempt to discredit being armed as a defense against crime.

Those who want us disarmed have used England and Wales as an example of a disarmed society where there wasn’t any cost to being disarmed. It was all a lie.

Crimes with firearms were lower in England and Wales before they instituted their “gun control” statutes, as noted by Joyce L Malcolm. The real purpose of “gun control” in England and Wales was to prevent violent insurrection. Now, a hundred years later, the UK has lost the right to free speech. The right to self-defense has become almost meaningless in England and Wales. The civilization of Britain is being destroyed by waves of illegal immigration, aided by its own government. Gun control has not worked well for the UK. Gun control, at heart, says the government does not trust the people.  The philosophical claim of “gun control” is that the government is always good and beneficial. It is a utopian claim.

There is a cost to the population having common access to firearms. It is relatively small because, while “gun control” may slightly reduce homicides committed with guns, it does not reduce total homicides. It may actually increase total homicides. Similarly, it does not reduce suicides in any meaningful way.

The cost might be in the few accidents that happen with firearms. If there are no firearms, there are no firearm accidents. However, the rate of firearm accidents has been reduced by 94% since 1933.  Everything has some amount of risk. More children are killed because of accidents with bicycles than because of accidents with guns.

This is why those who want the population disarmed rely on emotional arguments rather than on fact-based arguments. The facts do not support gun control.

Another strong argument against “gun control” in the United States is the Second Amendment and the need to maintain the rule of law.  That argument is addressed in other articles.

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About Dean Weingarten:

Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.