Sen. Mark Kelly said Sunday that footage of the shooting death of Charlie Kirk had hit his wife “pretty hard.”
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was grievously wounded Jan. 8, 2011, during a meeting with constituents in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona. Six people were killed in the shooting attack, including 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green.
“I would say this one in particular hit her pretty hard. And it’s because she saw the video,” said Kelly (D-Ariz.) of Kirk’s slaying last week on a college campus in Utah. The senator was speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Footage of Kirk being struck by the bullet that killed him have circulated widely.
Kelly added: “The video is all over social media. It’s kind of hard to avoid. And you can just kind of stumble right into it. So, you know, she’s had a tough week, I have to say. You usually don’t see these mass shootings as graphically as this one. I hope some of these social media companies can scrub this, you know, off the internet because it’s not good for kids to see this.”
He also said Kirk’s legacy was bringing people together to talk.
“Well, you know, Charlie Kirk and I didn’t agree on much politically,” Kelly told host Kristen Welker. “I’m a Democrat. He’s clearly a Republican. He was one of my constituents. The one thing we did agree on is his right to be out there speaking about issues on college campuses like he was last Wednesday. He had every right to be there. And will give him a lot of credit. He gave people a platform. And he would listen to people across the aisle.”
But the senator worried that more conflict and violence could occur.
“We are more divided than we have been probably in my lifetime or yours,” Kelly said to Welker. “And if we don’t collectively try to come together to fix it, you know, I think it can get worse. It can get a lot worse,” he said.
Having sustained a severe brain injury in the shooting, Giffords retired from Congress in January 2012 and became an activist in support of gun reform.
“She’s thinking and praying for the Kirk family,” Kelly said of her.
