The murder of Charlie Kirk, the political abyss, and firearms
In April 2023, Kirk said, I think its 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.Kirk could be considered a Second Amendment Absolutist, believing that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed, even for what some legislators consider reasonable gun control measures. Related Yes I want to take away your guns. When will enough be enough? Charlie Kirk, 31 years old, was a right-wing political activist, author, and media personality. He co-founded Turning Point USA in 2012 and was the executive director of the conservative organization, the chief executive officer ofTurning Point Action, Turning Point Academy, and Turning Point Faith.A reliable and consistent ally of Donald Trump, Kirk furthered conservative issues, includingCOVID-19 misinformation, and he spoke out against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives andcritical race theory. Dive deeper every day Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues Subscribe to our Newsletter today Kirk maintained hisoppositionto the rights of LGBTQ+ people and to marriage for same-sex couples, based, he said, on his Christian evangelical values by referring to a so-called LGBTQ agenda. He once stated that LGBTQ+ efforts aimed to corrupt your children. He was particularly critical of transgender rights and gender-affirming care by referring to them as dangerous and harmful.I would argue that Kirks words promote hate that justifies violence. Coincidentally, when Kirk was shot and killed on September 10, 2025, he was answering a question posed to him by a student in the crowd about how many transgender shooters he knew about.This question stemmed from President Trumps Department of Justices intention of banning guns from all transgender people following the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and school in Minnesota by someone who may have identified as transgender.In recent years, Kirk adopted Christian nationalist thinking and began arguing that there is no separation of church and state, a reversal of his earlier position. He claimed in 2022 that the separation of church and state was a fabrication. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Kirk traveled to college and university campuses nationwide, promoting and debating conservative ideas with a new generation of electoral voters.Unlike many other far-right politicians and pundits, Kirk was eager to speak and debate with young people. During his final moments of life, he was in front of thousands of college students beneath a canopy with the large words Prove Me Wrong.On the first leg of his American Comeback Tour at Utah Valley College, a Turning Point USA Facebook grouppromoted the event: Join Charlie Kirk on campus for a lively discussion of Freedom & America! Dont agree with Charlie? Great, you go to the front of the line. See you there! He was always willing and grateful for the chance to speak and debate with young people and to defend the First Amendments right to free speech.Inhis social media postannouncing Kirks death, President Donald Trump wrote, 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!If Charlie Kirk had survived being shot, we might have known whether he would have changed his stance on shall not be infringed at all costs. We do know, though, about Ronald Reagans change of mind, at least somewhat, following his recovery from an attempted assassinations bullet in 1981 and the serious head and permanent brain injuries inflicted on Reagans assistant and press secretary,Jim Brady.Reagan generally opposed firearms restrictions, but after being shot, his thinking evolved in favor of supporting specific restrictions, and in particular, by endorsing theBrady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.The Act required background checks on firearm purchasers and established a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases. After its permanent provisions took effect in 1998, it mandated the creation of theNational Instant Criminal Background Check System, an FBI-administered database. James Brady and his wife, Sarah, became highly visible gun reform advocates. In their work, they lobbied Congress for legislation that would eventually bear James Bradys name.A decade following the shooting, after leaving office in 1991, Reagan published an op-ed inThe New York Timestitled Why Im for the Brady Bill. He wrote of the nightmare of the shooting and that it might have been prevented if the bill had been law in 1981.The shocking gun-related assassination of Charlie Kirk comes in a larger context of political violence in the history of the United States: Two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump in 2024. Murder of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, and the shooting injuries of state senator John Hoffman and his wife in a separate attack, June 14, 2025. Break-in at the San Francisco home to kidnap Nancy Pelosi, resulting in the concussive head injury to her husband, Paul Pelosi, on October 28, 2022. Israeli Embassy staffers, a young couple Yaron Lischinsky, a German-Israeli, and Sarah Milgrim, an American Jew were killed at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., by a gunman who opened fire outside the museum during a Young Diplomats Reception hosted by the American Jewish Committee, May 2025.On Sunday, April 13, 2025, part of the Pennsylvania Governors residence was set ablaze in an alleged political assassination attempt while Governor Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside, April 13, 2025.Marchers in Colorado suffered a violent attack by someone who threw incendiary devices during their demonstration for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, June 2025.An execution-style murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, by a shooter on November 24, 2024, in Midtown Manhattan. Storming of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, by MAGA conspiracy backers.Pipe bombs left at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, January 5, 2021.Plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, 2020.Death threats on election workers and Secretaries of State following the 2020 local, state, and national elections. Representative Steve Scalise was shot in the hip and nearly bled to death on a baseball field. Others who suffered shooting injuries that day included U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika, June 14, 2017.Shooting and permanent brain injuries to Democratic Representative Gabby Giffords. In addition, 18 other people were shot, with six deaths, on January 8, 2011.Assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1963), Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (1968), Senator Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Medger Evers (1963), Emmett Till (beaten and lynched, 1955), Governor George Wallace (shot and seriously injured, 1972), Senator Huey Long (assassinated 1935), Other U.S. Presidents Assassinated: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901).Estimates vary, but records indicate that thousands of Black Americans were lynched, with sources like theTuskegee Institutedocumenting 3,446 Black victims between 1882 and 1968, and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) identified 4,084 racial terror lynchings of Black people in the South between 1877 and 1950 alone.In the aftermath of the shooting murder of Charlie Kirk, some people are playing the Blame Game. On Fox News, for example, within a short time following the announcement of Kirks death, conservative Outbreak podcast co-host Clay Travis, speaking on Hannity, accused Democrats: They killed Charles because they couldnt out-debate him. He blamed people like Hillary, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama for inflaming passions by calling MAGA people Nazis. While many of our past presidents have used times of national crisis as an opportunity to unify and bring the country together, Donald Trump saw the occasion as a way to further divide and incite the nations already wide political fissure.Though Trump never referred to past political violence perpetrated against Democrats, Trump blamed the radical left and the media for Kirks death, for demonizingin the most hateful and despicable way possiblethose they disagree within a video messagefrom the Oval Office.Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.For years, Trump continued his projection, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the worlds worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that were seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now! Though we continue to blame the epidemic of individual and mass shootings in the United State on, what I believe to be, the side issues of mental illness, political divisions and demonization, grievance, poverty, entitlement, fatherless homes and lack of supervision, violent video games, social media radicalization, the loss of spiritual and religious guidance, and all the other old and worn retreads.Most other nations around the world have these serious issues plaguing their societies as well. The United States, nonetheless, by a huge gap has the highest rate of allWestern countriesthroughout the planet in gun-related deaths: homicides, suicides, and accidents (4.31 deaths per 100,000 people in 2021. That was more than seven times as high as the rate in Canada, which had 0.57 deaths per 100,000 people and about 340 times higher than in the United Kingdom, which had 0.013 deaths per 100,000).With the United States leading every other country on the planet with the highest rate of guns at 120.5 per 100 people, how could anyone expect anything other than the fact that firearms are the leading cause of death in children and adolescents ages 0 to 17? On the day of Charlie Kirks assassination, someone in the U.S. House of Representatives called for the members to take a moment of silence to reflect and pray for Charlie Kirk and his family. While not everyone agreed that this would be appropriate in the House chamber, one thing is perfectly clear: nothing will be done in either the House or the Senate to pass firearms reform in an attempt to lessen the chances of another gun-related political or domestic homicide.What is the reason that many on the political right cannot and will not get out from behind their Second Amendment absolutist bullet-resistant vests and vote for gun-safety reform initiatives that can, and in the past, have saved lives?How many times must we scream into the void, ITS THE GUNS, ITS THE GUNS!! The late long-time Arizona Senator, John McCain, addressed the issue of the great political divide in his final letter to the nation just prior to his death. Though I include only a relatively small quote, you might wish to read theentire document:Fellow Americans,[w]e are citizens of the worlds greatest republic.We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been. We are 325 million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates.But, we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country, well get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
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