Taya Kyle: Gun Control Background Checks Won’t Work — Wife Of ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle Confronts Obama [Video]

On Thursday night, American Sniper widow Taya Kyle confronted Barack Obama in person during a live CNN broadcast, challenging the president on his recent gun control executive order. Chris Kyle’s wife claimed that the gun control laws are ineffective because none of the murderers would have been stopped by background checks. She also noted that the U.S. murder rate has lowered even as U.S. gun ownership has increased dramatically.

In a related report by the Inquisitr, when Obama made his gun control speech, he began tearing up. Some critics called Obama’s tears fake, while others said he was crying just like Adolf Hitler, who wept before implementing the Nazis’ gun control laws. George Zimmerman, shooter of Trayvon Martin, even went to so far as to call Obama a “piece of garbage” for his “crocodile tears.”

Obama’s executive order enacted several new pieces of gun control enforcement, with changes to background checks being one of the largest factors. According to Taya Kyle, gun control laws such as this are not effective, nor would they have stopped mass shooting such as the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre.

“I don’t know that any of them would have been stopped by a background check,” Kyle told Obama in front of the live CNN audience. “So I think part it we have to recognize is we cannot outlaw murder. Because the people who are murdering are breaking the law. They don’t have the moral code that we have. So they can do the same amount of damage with a pipe bomb. The problem is that they want to murder.”

Kyle told Obama that “background checks aren’t going to stop me from getting a gun.” Legally, she wants gun rights to be upheld so she can “have the freedom to carry whatever weapon I feel I need.” She says the gun control laws gives Americans a “false hope” that will not protect them. The American Sniper widow later noted that “we are at the lowest murder rate in our country. All time of low of murders. All time high for gun ownership. Why not celebrate where we are?”

In response, Obama first thanked American sniper Chris Kyle for his service as a U.S. Navy SEAL. He also agreed with Taya that the reduction of “murder rates and violent crime generally is something we don’t celebrate enough.” But the president disagreed that this success was due to gun rights, claiming that there was not a “one-to-one correlation there.”

“I challenge the notion that the reason for that is that there is more gun ownership. Because if you look at the where the areas are with the highest gun ownership, those are the places that the crime hasn’t dropped down that much,” Obama said.

Still, Obama admitted that “criminals will get their hands on firearms even if there is a background check.” He insisted that further gun control laws were necessary by making a comparison to traffic laws.

“In the same way, we don’t eliminate all traffic accidents, but over the course of 20 years traffic accidents get lower,” he explained.

During a commercial break for the town hall meeting, Obama shook hands with Kyle, but he also criticized the NRA for not showing up.

“They’re just down the street,” he said, according to the New York Post. “Since this is a main reason they exist, you’d think that they’d be prepared to have a debate with the president.”

Others in the crowd also criticized Obama for his gun control laws. At one point, Obama admitted to never owning a gun, and he was challenged by a rape survivor and a mother. But the president did have support from other members of the crowd, including Gabby Giffords, who has been pushing for gun control ever since she was injured severely during an assassination attempt.

Taya Kyle’s gun control critique did not end there. Writing an op-ed for CNN, she provided a lengthier explanation for why she believes Obama’s gun control efforts are fatally flawed. She believes the focus for preventing mass shootings should not be on the weapons, but instead on the killers and the flawed health care system that does not prevent them from taking action.

She used Eddie Ray Routh, the killer of her husband Chris Kyle, as an example of someone who had access to guns for years while working in an armory.

“Routh] worked in an armory with daily access to every caliber of high powered weapon for years,” she explained. “He chose to kill when he got out of an environment of accountability and drug testing. Simply having a weapon did not make him a murderer.”

Routh had claimed to be experiencing PTSD during his trial, but Taya says he was a “known drug user” who “repeatedly got out of trouble by claiming PTSD.”

“The officers would take him at his word, deliver him to a mental health facility where the facility would write a diagnosis which is known in that community as a label for likely drug use, and they would release him. Because of the HIPAA law and our desire to protect everyone’s privacy, we allow bad behavior to slip through the cracks.”

Kyle believes police should be able to intervene before the mass shootings ever occur based upon the warning signs provided by mental health professionals. She points out that there are plenty of existing gun control laws that are not being enforced.

“We have plenty of laws on the books that we cannot or do not enforce. Let’s start enforcing what we have before creating new laws,” she wrote.

As an example, she also noted how the hysteria over so-called “assault rifle” guns is overblown by some in the media since the existing gun control laws already cover those areas.

“In actuality, fully automatic weapons are already highly restricted and require an additional license most gun owners will never have,” she said. “The lack of understanding makes it easy to develop rhetoric and legislation that will calm the fears of people who don’t understand a given subject, but that doesn’t really change any end result because we cannot legislate the evil side of humanity.”

What do you think about American Sniper widow Taya Kyle’s gun control comments?

[Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for dcp]