Charlamagne Tha God spoke out about the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Thursday morning. And while most media figures—including those on the left—have offered nothing but condolences, The Breakfast Club host shared some hard truths about the cost of free expression.
“I don’t want to live in a country where media personalities are being shot and killed for their opinions or what they believe, but I also know that as much as we like to point to the First Amendment and say we all have freedom of speech, we are not free from the consequences of said speech,” Charlamagne told listeners. “That’s why mindfulness of what we say is very important, because there is a cost to everything that comes out of our mouth. And unfortunately, we don’t get to set the price.”
Kirk, 31, was assassinated by bullet during his remarks to thousands of students at a college campus in Utah on Wednesday afternoon. He had just been questioned about “how many” mass shooters in America in the past decade were trans people. He answered “too many” before the fatal shot rang out.
Charlamagne said Thursday that Kirk’s rhetoric came with a “price.”
“And I must say, Charlie Kirk understood the price of our freedoms more than most,” he said before playing the widely recirculated clip of Kirk declaring in 2019 that 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.”
Charlamagne continued, “I just wonder… when people say things like that, do they think they may be one of those deaths? Is worth it when one of those casualties is you or someone you love to protect the rights given to us by the Constitution?”
“If they believe they too could be one of those deaths, and they’re cool with that, I respect it,” he added, but “that sounds kind of ridiculous to me.”
“See, even if Charlie Kirk had a gun yesterday, it wouldn’t have protected him,” Charlamagne added. Kirk was shot with a bullet that came from a still-at-large shooter about 200 yards away from where he spoke, authorities say.
“When somebody got the drop on you, they got you,” the host went on. “The only thing that could have saved Charlie Kirk yesterday was keeping guns out of the hands of violent extremists like the person who killed him.”
He concluded, “And the only way to do that is with common sense gun reform.”
