Taya Kyle, widow of American Sniper Chris Kyle, took on President Barack Obama at a town hall on guns on Thursday.
The town hall meeting was held in Fairfax, Virginia, on Thursday evening, as reported by Breitbart News. The event, telecast on CNN, followed Obama’s announcement of his gun control executive actions this week.
The Texas resident was in attendance and confronted the President saying, “The thing is that the laws that we create, don’t stop these horrific things from happening, right? And that’s a very tough pill to swallow. We want to think we can make a law and people will follow it. But by the very nature of their crime, they’re not following it.”
“By the very nature of looking at the people who hurt our loved ones here,” Kyle added, “I don’t know that any of them would have been stopped by the background check, and yet, I crave that desire for hope, too.”
“And so I think part of it we have to recognize that we cannot outlaw murder, because people who are murdering right, are, they’re breaking the law but they also don’t have a moral code that we have,” the American Sniper’s widow said. “And so they could do the same amount of damage with a pipe bomb. The problem is they want to murder.”
She suggested, “I’m wondering why it wouldn’t be a better use of our time to give people hope in a different way.”
Kyle’s Twitter post and partial video from the event appears here:
Kyle continued, “I heard the federal prosecution of gun crimes is like 40 percent and what I mean by that, is that there are people lying on those forms already and we’re not prosecuting so there is an issue there right?”
“If we can give people hope and say also during this time, while you’ve been president, we are at the lowest murder rate in our country, all time low of murders,” she said. “We’re at an all-time high of gun ownership, right? I’m not necessarily saying the two are correlated but what I’m saying is that if we’re at an all-time low for murder rate that’s a big deal and I think most of us in this country feel like it could happen at any moment. It could happen to any of us at any time.”
Breitbart’s AWR Hawkins noted during the live streaming of the event for Breitbart News “that privately owned guns increased by nearly 150 million from 1994 to now, and crime steadily decreased throughout that period.”
Obama admitted that most cities are much safer than they were 10-20 years ago, and said we don’t celebrate the decrease in violent crime enough. Yet the President said he did not know if you could correlate the reduced crime figures to the rise in guns. He “challenged” the notion saying there are places where gun ownership is at its highest, crime has gone up.
The President quipped, “I’ve been very good for gun manufacturers.”
“When you talk about the NRA and after a mass shooting that gun sales go up, I would argue it’s not necessarily I think somebody is going to come take my gun from me, but I want the hope and the hope that I have the right to protect myself, that I don’t end up to be one of these families, that I have the freedom to carry whatever weapon I feel I need,” Kyle told the President. “Just like your wife said on that farm road.”
“I understand that background checks aren’t necessarily going to stop me from getting a gun, but I also know they wouldn’t have stopped any of the people here in this room from killing,” she explained. “And so it seems like almost a false sense of hope. So why not celebrate where we are? I guess that’s my real question, celebrate that we’re good people and 99.9 percent of us are never going to kill anyone.”
President Obama told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “Our position is consistently mischaracterized.” He added, “And by the way, there is a reason why the NRA is not here. You’d think that they would be prepared to have a debate with the President.”
When Cooper said many of the American people “they just don’t trust you,” Obama replied, “It’s fair to call it a conspiracy.” He asked “What are you saying?” He denied having “a plot to take everyone’s guns away.”
Tara Kyle wrote an op-ed that was published on Thursday saying gun control won’t protect us. She said she was sharing her thoughts “because I feel I can relate to people on both sides of the issue of gun control. I have been afraid of guns, I have sworn I would never use a gun on another person and so did not need one, and I have wanted to deny the existence of evil.”
The widow, whose husband was murdered by a man with a gun, said, “I have also become a gun owner, am prepared to defend myself with a firearm, and understand the fear of my freedoms being taken away. I have been touched by extreme violence and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil. Because I have felt, and lived, all of these things, I have spent much time thinking about evil, freedom and not only the world we live in, but the country too.”
Lana Shadwick is a writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. She has served as an associate judge and prosecutor. Follow her on Twitter @LanaShadwick2