Costs

Yes, Charlie Kirk said it, in April 2023. Snopes has it:

“I think it's worth [it] 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.”

The problem with Kirk’s way of thinking is that it never considers who bears the cost of gun violence. I’ll repeat something that I wrote in a 2021 post: no one lives life in the aggregate. The cost of gun violence is not borne equally by all members of a community. And who among us would be willing to think of the loss of a family member to gun violence as a cost worth paying, as part of a prudent deal?

Kirk’s family was beset by sudden horrific sorrow yesterday. I doubt that they believe it’s a cost worth paying.