Let's Talk About Charlie Kirk and Gun Violence

September 11, 2025

Yesterday afternoon, or earlier today in my night-shift world, I woke up to a message that began with, "He's dead!" After I realized, in my groggy state, that the person in question was not Donald Trump, I noticed the message that had been sent right before it, a screenshot of a news article about conservative "influencer" Charlie Kirk being shot at one of his own debate events.

And it's all social media has talked about since. Almost everyone I follow, as well as some real-life friends, have given their two cents, so it's time for me to share mine.

First of all, I get it, his death is shocking. It isn't something I had on my bingo card at all. It is, potentially, a major historical event, depending on how well history actually remembers Charlie. If not historical, then at the very least, somebody being alive and healthy one moment and then gone the next kind of throws you for a loop.

I also, unintentionally at first, watched the video of it happening -- also shocking. As an EMT who's been in plenty of level-1 traumas, I'm highly desensitized to real-life gore, and even I felt something mildly akin to sympathy upon watching it. But please know that sympathetic response had nothing to do with Charlie himself. It was automatic and based solely on the fact that a human, any human, lost about a liter of blood from his neck and then keeled over dead in front of my eyes. (His official time of death might be later after he was rushed to the hospital, but that's because resuscitation attempts typically need to be made before a doctor will officially call a death. He was clearly gone mere seconds after the bullet hit.)

I don't like violence in general. It doesn't bring me any joy to watch someone, even someone I know was terrible, have their neck pierced by a bullet. I'm just not the type of person who gets off on bloodshed; at my core I'm just too much of a kind person for it to feel good to me. So I understand why the video in particular is... upsetting, even if you hate the man. I'm not "celebrating" this death personally because it just isn't my style, though I don't blame others for feeling that way and won't be tone-policing the groups he spread hateful rhetoric about when it comes to what they have to say about him.

But while I might not be celebrating -- as I said late last year when another terrible person was gunned down by the legendary "Adjuster" -- I'm not sorry he's gone.

Also, I will, without a doubt, be celebrating the day Donald Trump dies, and I don't care what anyone says. I don't even want it to happen violently, though; I just want the cancer that is Trump to be removed from this earth for the good of every human being on it.

If you don't want people to celebrate your death, don't live your life in such a way that the world is a better place without you.

"But Charlie was a father!" you may say. "What about his wife and kids?" I'm gonna be honest with you, they're probably better off without him, too. That might sound cold because they are still currently grieving, but considering the things he's said in the past -- such as stating that he would force his hypothetical 10-year-old daughter to give birth to a rapist's offspring -- I can't imagine that growing up with him as a father would be good for those children in the long run. I'm sorry they might be traumatized by the loss, but they, especially the girl, would almost certainly be traumatized by growing up with someone like him as a father, as well. Having no father is better than having an openly racist, transphobic, misogynistic neo-Nazi as a father. And while his wife is probably not a great person either, or she wouldn't have married him, who knows. Now that he's gone, maybe she has a better chance at breaking through some of the brainwashing that tells her she and her daughter are less worthy than a man.

You don't get to be considered a saint just because you're dead. The things you did and said while you were alive still count, and the people reminding others about them are doing nothing but telling the truth. I hope that after people calm down from the initial shock of witnessing what they did, they will start to realize that more and more.

So I do find it very difficult to be sad that he's dead. As a matter of fact, I haven't even tried.

I am sad that this is the world we live in...

But it's a world that Charlie Kirk helped create with his ideology. He famously said in 2023 that having some gun deaths every year is "worth it," so as far as I'm concerned, he signed off on his own death years ago. I mean, if I advocated for removing seatbelts from cars, saying that the increase in crash-related deaths would be worth it for the freedom of not having to wear them... I certainly couldn't expect anybody to feel sorry for me if I later died in an accident because I wasn't wearing a belt.

For the record, I'm one of those leftists who are cool with guns. I just think that everybody who owns one should have proper safety training and probably have some kind of mental health screening and a background check first. I don't have all the answers when it comes to what the gun laws should be, I've never claimed to and I never really expect to. I support the second amendment within reason, but not enough to make it my entire personality, and I for sure would never say that children dying in schools is "worth it." Other than that, I think it's a great idea to be armed for your own protection, especially if you're a woman or a minority. As they say, "If you go far enough left, you get your guns back." But let's not pretend that it's people on the left who have the biggest problem with gun violence.

Now, back to Charlie. Let's also touch on the fact that it's being widely talked about how the "violent radical left" assassinated him "for his political views," which very well might be the truth; but as of writing this, we actually have no idea if it is or not. The last I checked, we don't even know who the shooter is or what their motive might have been. Sure, his abhorrent ideology seems like the most obvious answer, but maybe we should wait until we actually know before we state it like it's a fact. After all, people have said the same thing about several other shooters in the past, who later turned out to be registered Republicans or right-wingers, just like the overwhelming majority of mass shooters in this country. For all we know, it could have been some kind of personal vendetta. Since he clearly wasn't the nicest person, maybe he just pissed somebody off at some point, and since he was a public figure, it gave his murderer the perfect opportunity. We simply don't know what the truth is yet (as of writing this).

But we all know by now that the truth doesn't matter to this administration and those who blindly follow it. They will take any piece of information they can, whether it's verified or not, and run with it, if it means they can paint the "left" or any minority group such as immigrants or trans people as the enemy.

Kirk was shot in the neck in the middle of a debate where he implied that trans people make up a significant portion of mass shooters (false). His very last words were a smug and thinly-veiled racist stereotype.

But let's assume for a minute that the shooter was, in fact, a "radical leftist" and that many leftists are celebrating his death (the latter, to be fair, is actually true). Many of the people condemning it are doing so very selectively, because less than three months ago, in Minnesota, a Democratic state representative, her husband, and even their dog, were killed in a political assassination by a confirmed right-winger. The same day, a state senator (also a Democrat) and his wife were shot and hospitalized by the same man, who had a list of politicians (all Democrats) he was targeting. Trump and his supporters had nothing to say about that, and it disappeared from the news cycle within a couple of days. Previously, the right has made many inappropriate jokes about assassination or politically-motivated violence when it comes to people across the aisle from them. So if they're trying to claim moral superiority because they're mad that some leftists are happy about Charlie Kirk being gone, they don't have a leg to stand on there.

Regardless, as I stated earlier, I am sad that this is the world we live in, but Kirk and many others like him are largely responsible for this reality.

Violence begets violence -- but violence doesn't just take the form of gunshots and assassinations. We need to stop viewing violence as something that only involves bloodshed. It also comes in the form of words, of lies spread about minority groups, of hateful ideologies such as white supremacy and neo-Nazism, homophobia and transphobia. Of denying health insurance claims and putting profit over people's lives. Of making up evidence to blame already vulnerable communities for fake problems and create fear of the "other." Literally saying that other people's lives can be sacrificed for your desire to have a weapon as a toy. These things all count as a form of violence.

And when you live by that sort of violence, the odds are high that you will die by some kind of violence as well.

tags: politics