After His Death, Charlie Kirk's past Comment on Gun Deaths Sparks Controversy

One week after a Nashville school shooting left six dead, Charlie Kirk told a crowd that annual gun deaths were “worth it” to preserve constitutional rights. His death has pushed those words back into the spotlight.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative founder of Turning Point USA, told an audience last week that gun deaths are a price America pays for preserving the Second Amendment.

The remarks came during a Turning Point USA Faith event on Wednesday. They resurfaced one week after a mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, that left three children and three adults dead.

That attack marked the 130th mass shooting in the United States in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The database tracks incidents using data from law enforcement, media, government, and commercial sources.

The U.S. has averaged more than one mass shooting per day since January. At this pace, the country is set to surpass the 647 mass shootings recorded in 2022. "You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death," Kirk said. "That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am—I think it’s worth it."

Kirk said that the annual toll of gun deaths was, in his view, a necessary price to safeguard constitutional rights. He argued that such a trade-off was reasonable and rational, adding that few people were willing to speak about the issue in those terms, instead choosing to live in what he described as an alternate reality.