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 (though not on matters of faith, just on what Kirk was).
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, 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, 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.
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, 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 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.
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 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. Both are equally willing to spend us deep into debt. In fact, both parties seem to be taking a divide-and-conquer approach to America. They seem 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 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 saying viewpoints outside of any narrow party line. I don’t expect all of those things, but look for as many as I can find in one person.
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 fit that description, but neither party comes up with that in my view. Because they both put party before country, 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 you 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—at least, they are if the ideas you claim to be defending are those American ideals like freedom of speech and freedom of belief.
If you’re going to kill the other side just because it is the other side, and so 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 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 belief. Anyone who guns someone down for exercising those freedoms, isn’t defending America, they are dissolving it. They are taking it 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.
There have been plenty of other times where assassinations 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 more often there), and even among conservatives in my own extended family, talking about civil war like it is the answer to saving America’s values, rather than recognizing it 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.
