Taya Kyle, the widow of ‘American Sniper’ author and former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, directly challenged President Obama at a town hall on gun control on CNN Thursday night. During a question and answer session, Kyle was the first audience member to engage the president and kick off the gun rights conversation.

“We want to think we can make a law and people will follow it. By the very nature of their crime, they are not following it. We have to recognize we cannot outlaw murder because the people who are murdering are breaking the law but they also do not have the moral code we do,” Kyle said.

She then explained that gun violence is statistically on the decline nationwide, and that less stringent gun laws would afford her “the right to protect myself” in whatever manner she chose.

“Why not celebrate where we are … celebrate that we’re good people, and 99.9 percent of us are never going to kill anyone?” Kyle said.

Taya and Chris Kyle were always advocates for the NRA and gun rights, but they are also the victims of gun violence. Chris Kyle was shot in 2013 by a disturbed military veteran who he counted as a friend. In an op-ed published on CNN that same day of the town hall, Kyle elaborated on how the tragic murder of her husband proves her point about gun control.

The person who killed my husband, Chris, worked in an armory with daily access to every caliber of high powered weapon for years. 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. His life choices did.

At the town hall, Obama conceded that his recent executive order would not wipe out violent crime. However, he said that the statistics Kyle cited show that gun violence decreased during his presidency thanks to gun control, not in spire of it.

“The fact of the matter is: Violent crime has been steadily declining across America for a pretty long time, and you wouldn’t always know it by watching television, but overall most cities are much safer than they were 10 or 20 years ago,” Obama said. “I’d challenge the notion that the reason for that is because there’s more gun ownership. Because if you look at where are the areas with the highest gun ownership, those are the places in some cases where the crime rate hasn’t dropped down that much.”