US pro-gun activist slammed for attempted attack on Aussie tourist
An American woman who grilled an Aussie on holiday in New York about gun control has been condemned over four words she shouted out as he walked away.
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An American pro-gun activist has been blasted for her “horrible” clash with an Australian man over his support for basic gun control laws.
Kaitlin Bennett, who made international headlines for posing with an AR-10 rifle in her graduation photos at her alma mater, stopped the man and his group on the streets of New York for an interview on her right-wing YouTube channel Liberty Hangout.
A clip from the 2019 interview recently resurfaced and went viral on TikTok as America continues to grapple with its spiralling gun crisis.
In the clip, Bennett asks the group of Aussies whether they have the right to bear arms in Australia.
“Yep,” the man replies. “Under licence. So it doesn’t fall into the hands of nutcases and you have all of these high school massacres.”
Bennett clarifies: “So you have gun control? That’s terrible, I don’t want to live there.”
The man clarifies that Australia has guns, but not “like Americans” and when Bennett asks whether the gun control is good, he replies: “Absolutely it is.”
Despite the man’s calm and logical responses, the American peppers him with questions about why her “right to self-defence needs to be controlled”, and why she should “have a licence to protect myself against a nut case”, and how laws could stop guns falling into the wrong hands.
“Why is that right, it’s my right to use self-defence. It’s my property. Why is it correct for the government to have their hands in my self-defence?” she asks, which the man refutes as a “security so that innocent people don’t die”.
“It is a right – the right of self-defence everybody has it,” Bennett continues over the man.
“So your Constitution might not have it written in there but it is your right, if you’re in Australia, to defend yourself with whatever weapon you deem necessary.”
But the man stumps her with his next question.
“So let me ask this question: are you happy for innocent people to be killed?”
Bennett scrambles for an answer, asserting that was not what she or the “Second Amendment says, that’s not my right to self-defence”.
“But that’s what it implies. The evidence,” the man adds. “The proof is in the pudding.”
He then starts to walk away from the woman and back to his group, but Bennett follows him to argue she is the innocent person that needs defending.
“Well there’s laws for that as well, as there is for gun control,” the man says as he walks away, saying the group has to go – “we’ve got a concert, great catching up!”
But in a bid to get the last word Bennett calls after them: “Don’t ever become citizens, guys. We don’t need you here!”
When Bennett shared the interview in 2019 she declared she “set him straight” and insisted the man tried to tell her Australia is better than America “because they have gun control”.
Many were quick to praise the Aussie for his patience, and slam the American for badgering him on his group’s holiday.
“The worst thing about the whole conversation was the fact that she thought she won the argument in the end,” one person wrote.
“She’s so full of hate, he was so patient,” another wrote.
Others commented on Australia’s gun policy – which was changed by the Howard government in 1996 after the horrific Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania – which has seen almost no mass shootings, unlike the hundreds in America this year alone.
“Wait until she finds out people willingly gave their guns away after Port Arthur in 1996,” another user replied.
“The fact that they feel as if they NEED a gun says a lot about the country as a whole,” one commented.
Echoing the sentiment, one user simply stated “you don’t need a gun to defend yourself if nobody has a gun to attack you with.”
“At that point it just gets embarrassing. The whole world understands it, only the (United) States do not understand it.”
Love Island Australia star Cassidy McGill took issue with Bennett’s final four words during her clash with the Aussie holidayer - “don’t become US citizens”.
In a scathing TikTok viewed by almost half a million people, McGill lashed out at the gun activist.
“No one wants to visit (the US) because we’re all f***ing scared that we’re gonna get shot by someone who is crazy and didn’t have to work very hard to get a gun, they just walked into Walmart or wherever the f*** you go and they got a gun in three seconds,” she said.
“That’s really f***ing scary.”
She also said the age of the American Constitution – which is so old “that people still had slaves” – should probably be changed.
“I understand the right to bear arms, but when guns are the leading cause of death in children in America it’s f***ing time to change some sh**, like do you just like seeing innocent people die from guns?”
Originally published as US pro-gun activist slammed for attempted attack on Aussie tourist
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