Right wing activist Charlie Kirk is dead from a single gunshot apparently fired from a Utah State University building about 200 yards away from where he was sitting in a tent conducting an event with students. No suspect is in custody, no matter what the right wing media and social media influencers are saying. This is why BYU is on lockdown and there's likely a manhunt underway.
Donald Trump issued the following statement on Truth Social: "The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!"
This is where I condemn all violence by gun. There are a lot of people out there -- all of Congress and every Democrat on social media -- condemning political violence. But gun violence is at the heart of the political violence. Just ask the families of the Democrats assassinated in Minnesota in June. The gun killed them. The gun killed Charlie Kirk.
Political violence is bad, but if we had a decent well-regulated militia the gun wouldn't have been carried as easily onto that open carry campus. So I am saying that I condemn gun violence, and that condemnation extends to the killing of Charlie Kirk with one sniper's bullet aimed at his carotid artery.
With that said, Kirk himself said this in 2023: "I think it's worth 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"
In the video above, I clipped Vaughn Hilliard singing Charlie Kirk's praises and then Michael Feinberg warning against the devolution of our social compact into one where political violence becomes the norm. I don't agree with his bothsiderism, but his points are important, especially with respect to the rhetoric echoed from the right wing media to social media to what comes out of the White House.
If some sense is to be made of gun violence against prominent political figures, let it be that we have an actual reckoning about the guns and what we should be doing about them.
