Taya Kyle criticized President Obama’s executive actions on gun control Friday after doing so during the president’s town hall Thursday night.
The widow of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper who was the subject of the film “American Sniper,” went on “Fox and Friends” Friday morning and was asked about her confrontation with Obama the previous evening.
“The federal prosecution of gun crimes … we’re only getting 40 percent of those prosecuted in the first place under his administration,” Kyle said. “We’re not enforcing them, we’re not prosecuting, so why make another [law]? I think it’s a false hope type thing.”
Kyle has a personal connection to the gun control debate. Her husband was shot and killed at a Texas gun range on Feb. 2, 2013, by Eddie Ray Routh, a mentally ill Marine veteran.
She discussed how she appreciated Obama’s intentions with his gun measures, but she is still concerned about balancing security with basic Second Amendment rights.
“I think it sounds pretty good. It sounds pretty fair. The idea is just do something,” she said. “And no, you can’t fix everything, and I think we’re in agreement that you can’t fix everything. I think that when you talk about pulling away people’s freedoms, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds.”
Kyle expressed discomfort with the idea that “one man would say, ‘I know what’s best for everyone else,’ and by executive action make a new law.”
To illustrate her point, she brought up Obama mentioning a bill brought before the Senate after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that never passed because, in his opinion, many senators were afraid of angering their base.
“Yes! That’s democracy! That’s what’s supposed to happen,” Kyle said. “If they believe their constituents, people who they represent, won’t like it, they aren’t supposed to vote for it … It’s those kind of things that are more of the freedom issue as well.”
She said she believes everyone is working toward the same goal, no matter how heated the gun control rhetoric can get.
“I think, at the end of the day, we all just feel very passionately but we’re all on the same page,” Kyle said. “We all want a better world.”
