By now, you’ve probably seen the gruesome video. Moments after conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s death, up-close videos of his shooting circulated on social media, plastered across every platform.
It’s the second video showing a graphic murder that has gone viral in the past month: Kirk’s shooting and the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina.
If you haven’t watched the videos, don’t. You will never forget what you see.
Most of those who saw the clips probably didn’t seek them out. The images rolled unannounced into Instagram and X feeds, weighted equally in the algorithm with the latest “The Summer I Turned Pretty” recap.
Those who shared the clips might have done so to bring awareness to an injustice and call for action. But a glance at the comment section shows most of them have done little more than encourage conspiracy theories, celebration, and further calls for violence. Zarutska’s family has publicly asked people to stop sharing the footage of her murder out of respect for her dignity and their grief.
Through a phone screen, it’s easy to see an image rather than a person. In this case, we risk forgetting we’re watching the last few moments of a person’s life.
When anyone with an X account can rewatch the violent deaths of a public figure and an innocent woman over and over again, violence becomes normal. I saw the videos of Kirk’s and Zarutska’s deaths so many times, I stopped flinching.
The more we saturate ourselves in violence through media, the more desensitized we become. Virality incentivizes content creators to share violent videos, adding commentary or speculation. Social media users see the graphic images and scroll past without a second thought.
Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old who allegedly killed Kirk, was himself the product of a culture desensitized to violence and accustomed to blurring the line between online life and real life.
Engravings on bullet casings from the gun allegedly used to kill Kirk included allusions to video games, memes, and the lyrics of an Italian song “Bella Ciao,” an anthem for anti-fascists during World War II but featured more recently in the first-person shooter video game “Far Cry 6” and the Netflix series “Money Heist.”
The college dropout-turned-assassin didn’t pen a manifesto. He made a video game reference. Even if the engravings don’t reflect his motives in this attack, they reveal the kinds of media that formed him. This is popular culture at its most horrifying, up to its neck in violence. And we take it for granted.
By watching and sharing the video, we participate in the same desensitization toward violence that built a culture in which a 22-year-old shoots an unarmed civilian he has never met and other 20-year-olds dance on the grave in the comment section.
Moira Gleason is a senior studying English.
