Progressive podcast host, Jennifer Wlech, claimed on Saturday on her "I've Had It" podcast that Charlie Kirk "justified" his own assassination because he supported the Second Amendment.
She made her claims while reacting to a clip of Erika Kirk condemning those who had supported, mocked, or justified her husband's assassination.
"The person that I heard that justified his death was him," Welch said. "He’s the one that said on tape that if school kids die, but it means he gets to have a Second Amendment, then that’s what it’s going to be. He’s the one that justified it."
"And I believe at the time of shooting, he was talking about gun violence at the time. That’s wild to me, number one. And then for her — I want to get your opinion on this as a Black man — for her to say that people are dehumanizing Charlie Kirk," Welch told former CNN host Don Lemon.
Lemon agreed with Welch's comments.
"Everyone I know prefaces it the same way that you do — he should still be alive. The man should not be dead. However, it is true he promoted guns, he did not want sensible gun legislation, and he said that you have to have a certain amount of casualties, so to speak, in order to have a Second Amendment. He did say that. And he happened to die that way. That’s fact," he said.
But look, as someone who's been in grief before, you know, I don't know. You don't know how someone's going to react. But if people of color and members of the LGBTQ-plus community feel a certain kind of way about Charlie Kirk, I understand it because he was not kind to us. As someone who happens to be members of both of those, LGBTQ and a Black person, he wasn't kind. His thoughts weren't kind. His words weren't kind.
"I'm not happy that he died at all. But I also did not like what he stood for when he was alive. And I think it's okay to say that," he added.
Democrats have continued to argue that firearms were the central cause of Charlie’s assassination, while ignoring how, in the process of “not lik[ing] what he stood for when he was alive,” they demonized him personally and likened his ideas to those of Nazis and authoritarians. This was an act of political violence, not random violence. The weapon was not the cause; more often than not, it is merely an enabler of a deeper problem.
Consider Australia, a country with some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Over the weekend, two men who carried out an antisemitic terror attack were able to shoot and kill more than a dozen people before they were stopped. Was the problem the gun, or the antisemitism driving the attack?
If only Democrats viewed this issue with greater clarity.