Taya Kyle, the widow of "American Sniper" Chris Kyle, said Friday that she doesn't just oppose the idea of requiring background checks before buying guns, but also the idea that the president would make executive orders to get around elected officials who are representing their constituents' wishes.
"It's not just the freedom of, you know, I have to take a background check or not, it's not just that," Kyle, who questioned President Barack Obama
at his town hall Thursday night, told
Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program. "It's not just that. It's the idea that one man would say I know what's best for everyone else and by executive action make a new law."
At the meeting, Obama said that after the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings in Newtown, Conn., there were 90 percent of senators who believed in comprehensive gun control legislation, but wouldn't pass the bill because they were afraid of their voters.
"I thought, 'yes, that's democracy,'" Kyle said Friday. "That's what's supposed to happen. If they believe that their constituents, the people they're supposed to represent, wouldn't like it, they're not supposed to vote for it."
Kyle noted that this week she
wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com so it was likely the president's camp would have known of her questions, but she's not sure if her concerns were run past him before the event.
At Thursday night's town hall, Kyle, whose military hero husband was killed at at a firing range by a mentally disturbed Marine veteran he had been helping, criticized Obama's executive actions, telling him that she wants the hope "that I have the right to protect myself, that I don't end up to be one of these families, that I have the freedom to carry whatever weapon I feel I need."
Further, she told Obama at the George Mason University conference, "I know that background checks aren't going to stop me from getting a gun."
Kyle had been invited to the event along with several other prominent people whose lives have been impacted by gun violence.
She added she did feel that Obama heard enough on both sides of the argument, but she still doesn't think anything will change as a result.
After the event was over, Kyle said, she did talk to a few people in the audience who were passionate about their belief that a background check would have made a difference, "and maybe it would have."
But part of the problem is that there topic is being talked about in "hypotheticals."
"Somebody else could say it's a commonsense thing to have an armed guard add every school and another person might think that was overkill," she said. "I think at the end of the day we all just feel very passionately but we're all on the same page."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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