The only proper response is, “Oh, my God.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was shot dead.
The conservative commentator was answering questions from students at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University when someone fired at him. Footage showed Kirk’s neck jerk backward. He was taken to a hospital and, later that afternoon, died.
Kirk was 31 years old, a husband and father of two toddlers. He leaves behind a family who loves and needs him, and doubtless many friends. Like many other politicians and commentators, Kirk’s outspoken activism makes it easy to forget that he is a human being first — a political figure second.
I have criticized Kirk’s ideas on the Opinions page in the past. But nothing he has ever said or done could justify this shocking and wicked act of violence.
In the days and weeks after this tragedy, news outlets and commentators will run to pin the blame for this shooting on various political movements and ideas — even Kirk’s own rhetoric. Before news broke of Kirk’s death, political strategist Matthew Dowd speculated on air Wednesday that Kirk’s “hateful speech” led to his shooting.
Some of this blame lies with the trend, dating back to the 1960s, of intellectuals justifying protester violence. As columnist Daniel Henninger wrote after the shooting of abortion doctor David Gunn in 1993, once the justifications started, they never stopped.
“The personal virtue known as self-restraint was demolished,” Henninger wrote in an editorial for The Wall Street Journal. “We were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.”
This demolished a vital set of guardrails around American civic life — one of the reasons commentators like Dowd so freely place the burden of an innocent man’s killing on the victim himself.
While there are observable trends in modern American political violence, we must remember that no statistic can account for the battle that rages in each human heart between good and evil, peace and violence, dignity and inhumanity.
The shooter, barring some extraordinary mental illness, bears the guilt for this sin. Yet at the same time, we cannot isolate this action from the culture of death in which we are immersed. Pope St. John Paul II coined the term “culture of death” to describe a society in which human solidarity and dignity are denied in favor of efficiency and the law of power. We see this everywhere: abortion, euthanasia, human trafficking, third-party reproduction, and, undoubtedly, political violence.
We cannot too quickly equate words with violence, as many on the left have attempted with the “silence is violence” slogan. But the ugly and violent rhetoric we take for granted on the internet isn’t harmless, either. It shapes the way we think — shapes, even, the way we talk in real life about the world. It encourages us to adopt a worldview that assigns dignity to people based on their views or usefulness to us, further propagating this culture of death. None of us are totally innocent of this.
In a culture of death, no one wins. Not the shooter, not the victim, and certainly not the actual and virtual bystanders. The violence merely spirals, as Americans have witnessed too many times in the past month. Hell is a real place — we catch glimpses of it on earth.
This is not who we are as Americans, but even more fundamentally as human beings. Charlie Kirk believed in redemption, nationally and spiritually. May we live to carry it out.
Caroline Kurt is a senior studying English.
