Progressive podcaster Jennifer Welch argued that Charlie Kirk’s public defense of gun rights effectively justified his own killing, a remark that drew agreement from former CNN host Don Lemon and reignited a national debate over whether guns or political rhetoric are to blame.
Jennifer Welch, host of the I’ve Had It podcast, made the claim on Saturday while reacting to a clip of Erika Kirk condemning those who had supported, mocked, or justified her husband’s assassination. She tied Charlie Kirk’s public statements on the Second Amendment to a form of moral responsibility, arguing that his rhetoric made the violence easier to understand. The exchange quickly escalated because it framed the debate as one about ideas and consequences rather than mere hardware.
“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.” Those words cut to the heart of how some listeners interpret public figures’ comments about acceptable costs for policy goals.
Welch pressed the point further in conversation with former CNN host Don Lemon, asking him to weigh in on Erika Kirk’s response and the wider cultural reaction. “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 Lemon. The question put the conversation at the intersection of grief, politics, and identity.
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.
Lemon agreed with Welch’s characterization while also making clear that Kirk’s death should not be celebrated. “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. His remarks acknowledged both the tragedy and the role of public messaging.
“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, underscoring the line many struggle to walk between condemning violence and criticizing an individual’s politics. That tension has become central to coverage of the incident, with different camps reading the same facts through opposing frames. One side sees an avoidable cultural escalation, the other sees cold political calculation turned deadly.
Many Democrats and media commentators have leaned on firearms as the primary explanation for the assassination, arguing that access to guns made the act possible. Critics on the right respond that focusing only on the tool misses the motive and the social dynamics that feed political violence. The argument that a weapon is merely an enabler, while rhetoric and dehumanization create targets, has gained traction among observers who fear a rush to technocratic fixes.
There are sobering examples from around the world that complicate the simple-gun-is-the-problem framing. Consider Australia, a country with strict gun laws, where two men carried out an antisemitic terror attack and were able to kill more than a dozen people before being stopped. That event underscores that murderous ideology can strike even where firearms are tightly controlled, and it shifts the focus back to the beliefs and extremism that drive attacks.
The debate now unfolding over Charlie Kirk’s death is as much about how we speak about one another as it is about whether to tighten regulations on guns. Some see harsh rhetoric as a predictable escalation that can radicalize unstable people, while others warn that policing speech risks chilling political debate and misplacing responsibility. Both concerns matter, and neither alone fully explains why violence happens.
