Today was a sad day for an increasingly violent America. I don’t know much about Charlie Kirk because I never listened to him. All I know is what I heard about him, which ranged from his being a good, faith-based conservative to a man covering his hatred and bigotry with faith. I am agnostic on the matter (not on matters of faith, just on Kirk because I never heard him).
What I do know is that Kirk’s assassination in the middle of a public speech was a dark day for America. I debated whether I should include the intensely graphic video of the moment the man was slaughtered (because that is what it looks like—slaughter), but I decided to include it with a warning because it takes violence as a way of communicating our disagreements out of the abstract and places it right in front of us. We’ve spent a lot of time in America talking about it in the abstract.
I don’t think it is a good thing to watch that kind of real violence in a video, but for me the violence in America—whether school shootings that almost happen like they are routine in America or attempted assassinations of president Trump or today’s assassination of Kirk, became starkly more real when viewing the video. I would recommend that anyone who might be too deeply affected by seeing blood gush out of a man’s jugular vein when what you are watching is a real horror right before people’s eyes and also your own and not theatre makeup or movie magic, which we easily dismiss because we know it isn’t real, don’t watch it.
For me, this is not a problem of people having guns because anyone who wants to do something like this can get his hands on a gun in the black market, even if ALL guns were illegal. When did prohibition of alcohol stop people who really wanted it from being able to get it?
Kids have gone to schools armed with pipe bombs, which can be even more deadly than guns. They could go armed with exploding rockets from the Fourth of July, fired like bazookas out of plastic pipes for guns. Those who want to be violent will find their tools of violence. They could use mass poisoning, toxic gases, Molotov cocktails, on and on. I’m almost reluctant to mention ideas, except that I realize anyone who is bent in that direction is clearly way ahead of me in thinking up ways to do it en mass.
It is even less a problem about guns for me because I grew up in an age when kids drove to high school with gun racks over the rear window of their pickup trucks, sometimes with guns in them. They parked them openly visible in the high-school parking lot, and no one cared and no school shooting ever happened. None of us ever even worried that it would happen because it never had. We built gun racks and cabinets in wood shop, often without locks, and no shop teacher was the least bit worried about how the cabinet would be used.
There were no scanners at school doors and no school guards. More importantly, in the world of my childhood, I used to say, and so did the kids around me, “I may not agree with your view, but I’d fight to the death for your right to express your view.” I still hold that view today. To me, it is what defined America, growing up.
So, whether the target is a president like Trump, with whom I find as many dislikable things that I strongly disagree with as I did with Biden for four years (who had different dislikable things), it troubles me to see any of them, Kirk included, gunned down for expressing their views. Both the Left and the Right in America have been talking far more violently since Trump’s first term—talking about civil war like it needs to happen.
I agree with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who said in response to this incident in congress today,
“We need everyone who has a platform to say this loudly and clearly, we can settle disagreements and disputes in a civil manner, and political violence must be called out, and it has to stop,” Johnson said before it was known that Kirk had died from the shooting.
Kirk, 31, was the co-founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative organization that was instrumental in rallying young voters to the Republican Party and for President Donald Trump.
My platform is very small, but that is what I’ve chosen to do today—to say it doesn’t matter whether you are a liberal or a conservative on this issue: freedom of speech only works if both sides are free to exercise it without being gunned down—either by their censorious government or their angry countrymen. Without it, this isn’t America anymore.
That makes it my responsibility, and yours, too, if you consider yourself a traditional American or choose to take the responsibility up, to speak out clearly against this approach to settling cultural disagreements, whether it is someone like Trump who gets gunned down or someone like Obama. For me, freedom of speech was one of the most enshrined values of America. That and freedom of religion were what America was all about to me. So, we lose that, then, in my opinion we lose America altogether.
I have people who leave my website off and on for writing so harshly against Trump now that he has become president again, and they forget that I spent four years writing as harshly against Biden on a regular basis, and I had people leave my writing regularly when I wrote against Biden, too. We are a polarized nation where most people won’t stomach any view opposite of their own. I can sit down and have an enjoyable lunch with either staunch liberals or staunch conservatives (and do so regularly). That’s because I have lunch with the person, not with their party.
I’m not a party man—not by a long shot. I stopped believing either political party even comes close to having the answers for us or that either party is more righteous than the other. I have seen abundant examples of unrighteousness of the kind that most of us can agree about among the leaders of both. Both have proven equally willing to spend out nation deep into debt. In fact, both parties seem to be taking a divide-and-conquer approach to America. They are intent upon growing by dividing us.
I look for candidates who are smart, wise, fair, well-spoken, congenial, care about people, and diplomatic but willing to take stands and to listen and think, and I look for those who support as many of my somewhat conservative (but not always) values as I can find in one person but who are not locked into a school of thought but are open to expressing viewpoints outside of any narrow party line. I don’t expect all of those things, but I look for as many as I can find in one person, and I tend to place qualities of individual character higher than ideology.
Those kinds of people seem to be in extremely short supply, even though I have known people like that; and I blame the party system for that short supply because, with hundreds of millions of Americans at their disposal, surely either party could find some people who in large part fit that description, but neither party comes up with that in my view. Because they both put party before country and fill a clown car with candidates, I don’t have a party to vote for.
When I heard people writing today in response to Kirk’s assassination things like, “This is why we need to stop being so nice to other side. This is where we have to do as they do and start killing them like they are trying to do to us,” I only think, first, When were was the person saying this ever so nice to the other side? and, then, There goes America, itself, because killing people in self-defense is one thing, but killing them over their ideas, as this shooter apparently did, are two opposite reasons for owning a gun.
Those two diverging reasons for having a gun cannot be reconciled if you claim to be defending the twin pillars of American society—freedom of belief and freedom of speech (to express what your beliefs are). If you’re not purely defending those, you are not doing what the Second Amendment is even about; and you cannot defend them by killing the people who are exercising them!
If you’re going to kill the other side just because it is the other side, and, thus, you hate them, then you don’t believe in America at all … at least nothing like the America I grew up believing in and pledging my allegiance to. In the constitutional America of my more tender years, the ability to stand in public and do what Kirk did is the absolute core value that made America great—freedom of belief (including religion) and freedom to talk about those beliefs. Anyone who guns someone down for exercising those freedoms, isn’t defending America, they are dissolving it. They are diminishing it. They are taking America away from all of us.
The last two shootings that really made the news—one by a transgendered man who was enraged with the world and this one—both appear to be by people on the Left with guns. It may be that it will not turn out to be that way when the killer is found; maybe it was someone Kirk cheated out of money or cheated out of his wife (not saying I have the slightest reason to believe that, but just saying it could turn out to be that KIND of thing, rather than about his politics, but probably not). I suspect it is fair to say that the two people who tried to assassinate Trump stood far on the Left, too. So, the Left has no room to wipe its hands of the stains of violence from its own extremists, though I’ve often heard them talk as if all the dangerous, armed extremists are on the Right. It’s position on guns cuts it no grace on this issue where those on the Left are often the ones using the guns (or the Molotov cocktail that turn protests into riots).
There have also been plenty of other times where assassinations or mass murders were by extremists on the Right in the past, and there will be again; but the last few years are the first time in my life I’ve heard so many people on both sides, but especially the Right (maybe because I read in that realm more often), and even among conservatives in my own extended family, talking about the need for civil war like it is the answer to saving America’s values, rather than recognizing that killing people over their bad ideas is really the total shredding of those most sacred values.
If we have to kill the other side to win the culture wars, then we’ve just lost. So, today, I’ll enshrine the words of Mike Johnson above, even though he is not a man I find myself very often writing in support of.
“We need everyone who has a platform to say this loudly and clearly, we can settle disagreements and disputes in a civil manner, and political violence must be called out, and it has to stop.”
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I found myself sickened and profoundly saddened by what happened yesterday. It was horrifying. Let me be clear: I don't see this man as a hero, but he was a man and what happened to him was absolutely despicable. Words cannot describe the ache of the soul that sees true human suffering.
A human being died. That filled me with the deepest sadness. I don't cry for what he represented. But I did cry for a human being. And I cried for what we are doing to one another. I feel the deepest sorrow at those who make this a message for more hate and justification for hate and harm against their fellow human being.
This is not a eulogy for a martyr. This should, I hope, be a moment of realization to love one another regardless of our passions. It should not be a deepening of the divide, nor more noise for "whataboutism" and self justifications. I'm sad that it won't be for all too many, and that the darkest moods of the human soul will find it as a symbol for more divide, more hate and more cruelty against their neighbor.
David, you are doing humanity a service by allowing them to come face-to-face with evil (albeit via video). Not the “made for TV” evil of Criminal Minds or Dexter, but actual, real-life evil. Personally, I don’t need to see actual evil to know it exists. Nor do I want to see something I can’t unsee (which is why I don’t watch the two shows mentioned above).
I am reminded of Philippians 4:8, which says, “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.”