Context is everything. You need to listen to the entire statement he made on April 5, 2023, during a panel discussion at the TPUSA Faith event in Atlanta, Georgia, titled “Faith, Family, and Freedom.” The comment came in response to a question about how to defend the Second Amendment amid public debates on gun violence. Kirk defended unrestricted gun ownership by citing statistics like defensive gun uses (estimated at 500,000–3 million annually by some studies) outweighing criminal misuse, arguing that in a free society there must be trade offs.
