'American Sniper' widow confronts Barack Obama over gun control

The widow of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle confronted Barack Obama during a town hall meeting about guns on Thursday, putting the president on the defensive over what may be the final major domestic policy initiative of his presidency.

In the first – and perhaps most contentious – question of the meeting broadcast live on CNN, Taya Kyle told Obama that his plans for increased gun control measures such as universal background checks would not make Americans safer from gun violence, particularly mass shootings.

“We want to think that we can make a law and people will follow it,” Kyle said. But “by the very nature of their crime, they’re not following it. By the very nature of looking at the people who hurt our loved ones here, I don’t know that any of them would have been stopped by the background check.”

Kyle, whose Navy Seal husband was shot and killed at a Texas shooting range in February 2013, suggested that the president focus instead on the plummeting national crime rate, a sign that existing laws restricting access to firearms are enough.

“If we can give people hope and say also during this time while you’ve been president, we are at the lowest murder rate in our country – all-time low murders … why not celebrate where we are?” Kyle asked. “Celebrate that we’re good people, and 99.9% of us are never going to kill anyone.”

After thanking Kyle for her husband’s service, Obama acknowledged that although low national crime rates are “something that we don’t celebrate enough”, attempting to further lower the rate of firearm deaths wasn’t a fool’s errand.

“In the same way that we don’t eliminate all traffic accidents, but, over the course of 20 years, traffic accidents get lower – there’s still tragedies,” Obama said. “There’s still drunk drivers. There’s still people who don’t wear their seat belts, but over time, that violence was reduced, and so families are spared.

“That’s the same thing that we can do with gun ownership.”

Obama’s question-and-answer session with gun rights activists at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, came on the heels of a major public address on the issue of gun violence in the US, in which the president outlined new rules that will close important background check loopholes. Obama also wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, published on Thursday, in which he declared that he would “not campaign for, vote for or support any candidate, even in my own party, who does not support common-sense gun reform”.

Kyle, for her part, had written a column for CNN earlier that day on the same topic – albeit with a far different thesis. “We can’t legislate human nature,” Kyle wrote. “If we add up the number of these mass killers over the last decade, how many people are we talking about? Fewer than 40 over the last decade? Do we want to make laws for millions based on the choices of fewer than 40 evildoers?”

Chris Kyle’s killer, former marine Eddie Ray Routh, was found guilty of murder in February 2015 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.