Note: This was written the evening of the tragedy
In the last few hours, I’ve seen so many clips, reels or whatever they’re called showing conservative outrage over the horrific public assassination of Charlie Kirk. It’s both saddening and frightening to see them alternating between intense anger and pushing through their tears at the sudden loss.
However, what I haven’t seen in all the years since Columbine is any amount of outrage or sorrow these same people when little kids get slaughtered at their schools.
What I have seen is Charlie Kirk saying that some gun deaths every year are “worth it” if those losses of life protect “our other God-given rights”. I have seen Alex Jones get sued to oblivion for falsely and maliciously claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting were faked and the grieving parents were paid actors. Thousands, if not millions, of his followers went along with this. Some even went out of their way to harass the grief-stricken parents.
This is insane. Utterly insane. Maybe if Second Amendmentists felt even one fifth of the anger over the horrifying assassinations of children in their classrooms as they are now over the needless death of Charlie, then maybe, just maybe, the gun used in this crime may have been out of reach of the shooter.
By the way, there was a school shooting in Colorado today. Three students in the hospital, the shooter (another kid) killed himself. That one wasn’t news-worthy. In fact, there are so many school shootings (1375 between 2000 and 2022) that only the worst of them make the national news.
It can be a challenge to agree on anything else, but the Left and the Right should easily be able to come together to show our anger and sadness over these deaths, just as much, if not more so, than our outrage when a public figure we agree is stricken.
Gun violence Is deplorable no matter who the victim is. But its even more deplorable when its an innocent child rather than an adult who was morally fine with their deaths.
For his sake, if there is a next phase of existence, that we should hope that he doesn’t encounter any of the hundreds of kids whose lives that were lost to gun violence were deemed to be “worth it” in his eyes.
Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk. Thoughts and prayers to his wife too. And not just the meaningless platitudes Republican politicians offer when a mass shooting does make the news. His wife and kids lost their husband and father. Charlie wasn’t a fan of empathy (“I can’t stand empathy, actually. I think it’s a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage”), but that shouldn’t stop us from expressing empathy and sorrow for the family.
My only hope is that this loss opens up a conversation about common sense gun law reform AND a heartfelt discussion about de-escalating the level of rhetoric coming from public figures at the extreme edges of both the left and the right. I don’t have faith that this will actually happen, but if it did come to occur, then there would at least be something positive to come from this.
For what it’s worth, as much as I disagreed with Kirk on pretty much every single topic, I did appreciate that he welcomed debate in public forums with people who didn’t share his views. He could have comfortably stayed within the right-wing echo chamber and amassed money, funds and followers, but he welcomed the debate.
However, I do need to close with a couple of his own quotes:
“I think it’s worth it. 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.”
We must ask ourselves now: Is that cost TRULY worth it?
Leave a Reply