Taya Kyle, wife of American Sniper Chris Kyle, questions President Obama during town hall focused on gun control.

Courtesy of Yahoo Finance:

Taya Kyle was the first member of the audience to ask Obama a question. Kyle is the widow of Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL whose life as the deadliest sniper in US history was detailed in the film "American Sniper." Kyle was killed when he was shot at a shooting range by a Marine veteran. 

Taya Kyle questioned whether Obama's actions would prevent shooting deaths in the US. She asked why he didn't choose to provide "hope" to the American people in a different way — for example, noting that the rate of violent crime in the US had dipped to its lowest level in more than three decades. 

"I understand that background checks aren't necessarily going to stop me from getting a gun, but I also know that they wouldn't have stopped any of the people here in this room from killing. And so it seems like almost a false sense of hope," she said. "So why not celebrate where we are?" 

Obama told Kyle that she was correct about the decline of violent crime. But in his answer, Obama compared further steps on gun control to making car travel safer, even in the face of declining traffic deaths. 

"In the same way that we don't eliminate all traffic accidents, but, over the course of 20 years, traffic accidents get lower — there's still tragedies," Obama said. "There's still drunk drivers. There's still people who don't wear their seat belts, but over time, that violence was reduced, and so families are spared." 

"That's the same thing that we can do with gun ownership," he continued. "There is a way for us to set up a system where you, a responsible gun owner ... can have a firearm to protect yourself, but where it is much harder for somebody to fill up a car with guns and sell them to 13-year-old kids on the streets."

Now I know that Taya Kyle is the new conservative sweetheart, who is being used to put a pretty face on ugly political points of view, but I have to question the strategy of sending a widow whose husband was killed with a firearm by a man that he took to a gun range to work on his PTSD, to question a President who is working to protect others from a similar fate.

That just seems counter intuitive and not just a little ironic. It is almost like having a mother whose children died after being thrown from a vehicle to speak out against mandatory seatbelt laws.

For those who are interested here is a transcript of the entire town hall.