“I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
The horrific scenes in Orem, Utah on Sept. 10 proved that, once again, gun violence spares no one. Its victims now include one of the most prominent young conservative commentators, Charlie Kirk. Reactions to his death seemed to fall along party lines. Those on the right emphasized his role as a father and a notorious debater on college campuses, spreading traditional values and conservative ideology — those on the left capitalized on the brutal irony of his death by firearm, in hopes it would sway more conservatives to support the gun control that might’ve prevented Kirk’s death.
Kirk has since been praised as a shining example of political engagement for his “Prove Me Wrong” style of public debates with students. While these media events were technically public forums, the debates were carefully curated and stacked in his favor. Kirk, a professional public speaker, would set up the event and hold his special microphone while surrounded by fans — who would loudly cheer or boo accordingly — against a student who has done little more than prepare a “gotcha” question. There’s a dramatic power imbalance at play, and it follows a longstanding tradition pioneered by Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and other conservative influencers: using abusive debate tactics against unprepared students, before reposting the clips that make them look victorious.
We can recognize Kirk’s death as an impactful tragedy and a shame, while still acknowledging that his political tactics were lopsided, invalidating and, at times, misleading with an ideological agenda to prove. Regardless of whether he engaged in political discourse on the ground level, the tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s death does not discount our ability to critique and learn from the way in which he did it.
This pattern of assassination attempts — from President Donald Trump, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman to now Kirk — has unveiled a dangerous reality in the United States. Political violence has become a bipartisan side effect to our polarized climate, and gun deaths are accepted as a necessary caveat to the Second Amendment. Kirk’s free speech got him killed, and that’s unacceptable. Yet the controversy around his speech doesn’t concern his extreme nationalist ideals, but rather the resultant feelings of vitriolic hate and prejudice spread by his existential opposition to people of color, immigrants and non-Christians. It’s this atmosphere of hateful ideas that the family of Tyler Robinson, the suspect in custody, said he despised about Kirk.
Kirk’s political beliefs in open gun laws and adversarial debate came home to roost as the cycle of gun ownership and violence claimed the life of one of its most active advocates. A staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, Kirk believed the solution to growing levels of gun violence was to arm the good guys, rather than limiting ownership of high-capacity or high-power firearms. “If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards,” he preached on his podcast, “why don’t our children?” Kirk has never publicly reckoned with the question of whether it’s emotionally healthy for children to grow up in a gun-plenty security state to protect them from radicalized gun-wielders. Regardless, he championed the unobstructed right to bear arms — and it’s the abuse of this right that allowed Robinson to shoot and kill Kirk.
When children wind up living in a version of this gun-heavy reality, we wind up with situations like Kirk’s assassination. Photos on Facebook show Tyler Robinson surrounded by guns — smiling and posing with them — lacking the respect and caution that should accompany brandishing such deadly weapons. Yet conservative voices claim it’s not this heavy gun culture which radicalized him, but instead his exposure to liberal ideology, in part from his transgender roommate and supposed partner.
In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death, fellow conservative commentator Steven Crowder shared a memo from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives warning that the shooter’s bullets were emblazoned with inscriptions of “transgender ideology.” Local papers such as the Washington Times echoed this rhetoric, and even the Wall Street Journal published a story titled “Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution.”
After closer analysis of the supposed propaganda, it turned out the inscriptions were a series of references to video games and anti-authoritarian internet memes. One of the more humorous notes referenced a popular furry flirtation meme — which has been used to suggest that Robinson might’ve been a furry — and another mocked the reader by saying, “If you read This, you are GAY Lmao.” Others had more overtly political messaging, with one of the bullets emblazoned with the lyrics of “Bella Ciao,” a notoriously anti-fascist Italian folk worker song. The most interesting, however, was the bullet saying, “hey fascist! CATCH!” with a set of arrows pointing in different directions. This is a direct reference to the video game “Helldivers 2,” a satirical horde-based first-person-shooter where players are ostensibly tasked with “saving democracy” by defeating waves of alien and robot enemies.
The transgender narrative is one which has been forced at every turn in an effort to create a convenient, non-conservative scapegoat. Even the story of Robinson’s transgender roommate has been overblown to suggest that they were a radicalizing co-conspirator, despite the fact that they have cooperated diligently with police and were reportedly “aghast” at news of the shooting. By all indications, Robinson’s family was conservative, and he maintained an interest in the typical shooter hallmarks of firearms and video games. The dubious link to fabricated radical trans ideology and furry culture through Robinson’s roommate is the only one conservatives have to deflect from the complicated truth of the matter.
It’s a tragedy that Kirk, or anyone expressing their political opinion for that matter, would be the target of political firearm violence. But what makes Kirk’s death especially poignant is the fact that this is the exact type of violence he has tacitly encouraged in words and political ideology that has resulted in deadly attacks across party lines.
When David DePape — the attacker who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and brutally beat her husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer — was captured by police, Kirk facetiously called for him to be bailed out of jail. “If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out,” Kirk said on his podcast in October 2022. When Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman was killed in her own home, Kirk was silent, posting a birthday tribute to the president instead. Kirk was selective with how he doled out respect for the wounded or dead, and it would be a falsehood to claim that the way conservatives demand his memory be treated now is how he universally treated others in life.
On the same day as Kirk’s death, but to significantly less attention, a school shooting took place in Colorado where 16-year-old Desmond Holly shot two students at a high school and then killed himself. Holly’s social media presence suggests he maintained a keen interest and possible support of Nazism and Holocaust denial, compounded with an apparent fetishization of the Columbine High School shooters. But there’s been little public backlash towards this incident, or to the societal influences which shaped him into the breed of killer he became. We must not treat these cases as damning proof that any demographic group is, by their nature, inherently evil, but as examples of dangerously complex neuroses that have led to unacceptable losses of life.
Political violence should always be condemned. But the motives of violence must always be examined to learn what drives people to such lengths of inhumanity. We must work to correct the underlying ills of alienation, loneliness and a violent commitment to any dogma or ideal that breeds murderers by the dozen. But at the same time, we must keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of anyone who might show an inclination towards this kind of violence.
It’s up to those on the right to decide if Kirk was correct, and whether his own death was an acceptable, rational price to pay for the right to bear arms. If it wasn’t — and if his death really was a tragedy that could’ve been avoided with more treatment of imminent mental health concerns and less widespread availability of hunting and assault weapons — then it would behoove all who cared about Kirk to join the fight in preventing further deaths at the hands of gun violence. Otherwise, the cycle will repeat ad infinitum, with people continuing to kill with guns and others defending their right to do it.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Noah Zaldivar and Maggie Turner at [email protected].
