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Chinese Immigrant Tells David Hogg Threat of Tyrannical Government is Why She ‘Will Never Give Up My Guns’

Lily Tang Williams: ‘The debate on gun control is over’

Published: April 11, 2024
  |   By Chris Karr
Chinese Immigrant Tells David Hogg Threat of Tyrannical Government is Why She ‘Will Never Give Up My Guns’

Chinese immigrant Lily Tang Williams told gun rights activist David Hogg that the threat of a tyrannical U.S. government is why she will never give up her Second Amendment rights.


Williams posed her argument during a Q&A session following a debate between Hogg and libertarian activist Spike Cohen hosted by Dartmouth Political Union.

“Actually, I am a Chinese immigrant who survived communism,” she began. “And under Mao, you know, 40 million people were starving to death after he sold communism to them. And 20 million people died – murdered during his Cultural Revolution.”

She continued: “So, my question to you, David, is that can you guarantee me, a gun owner, tonight, our government in the U.S., in D.C. will never, never become a tyrannical government? Can you guarantee that to me?”

“There’s no way I can ever guarantee that any government will not be tyrannical,” Hogg replied.

“Well, then the debate on gun control is over because I will never give up my guns,” Williams said. “Never, never.”

Williams suggested Hogg should go to China and see how gun control functions under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).


The debate, which ran about 80 minutes, was hosted at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where Williams is currently running in District 2 as a Republican for U.S. Congress.

Hogg has been a prominent voice advocating for gun control after surviving a 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that claimed the lives of 17 people.

In the years since, Hogg has co-founded the advocacy group March for Our Lives and co-authored the book #NeverAgain: A New Generation Draws the Line with his sister, Lauren.

On the topic of gun deaths in the United States, the moderator asked Hogg, “Why does the U.S. have this problem when other developed nations do not?”

“It’s the guns,” he replied. “I hate to break it to you guys, I mean, you want to talk about graphs?” – a reference to Cohen’s use of multiple graphs to support his argument.

“I wish I had my own printout of graphs that, you know, the countries that – the relationship between the rate of firearm ownership and the gun homicide rate, even putting aside the suicides,” he continued. “There is a pretty strong correlation with all these developed countries.”

Hogg added: “It’s the guns, really, at the end of the day. … If you look at the countries that have the highest rate of gun violence, they also have poverty, they also have systemic racism, they also have all these other forms of systemic injustice that I agree that we need to address. But the reality is it is far harder for what happened in Parkland to happen in Switzerland or in the UK or in almost any other highly developed country than it was in the United States.”

In a rebuttal, Cohen suggested that an example of systemic racism is “putting a young black man in jail for owning a gun that he wouldn’t have had any trouble owning if he lived up the road in a whiter, wealthier area.”

Cohen produced graphs showing data from the UN Trust Facility Supporting Cooperation on Arms (UNSCAR) that analyzes the relationship between gun ownership and the rate of gun murders.

Though all countries mapped on the graph report somewhere between 5 and 40 firearms per person, the U.S. has over 100 guns per person. Even so, Cohen pointed out, the U.S. has less than five firearm homicides per 100,000 people. While Honduras has 70 per 100,000, eight other countries report somewhere between 10 and 40 firearm homicides per 100,000 people. Other countries on the graph have a comparable rate to the U.S.

“There is no correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide,” Cohen concluded.


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