Is Charlie Kirk At Fault In His Own Murder?

Betteridge's Law of Headlines and speaking ill of the dead

What really sent me was when a very old and dear friend of mine told me privately that, although he¹ had offered prayers for Charlie Kirk’s family, he had not prayed for Charlie Kirk himself, because Kirk had brought the shooting on himself.

After all, Kirk was a strong supporter of expansive gun rights. Kirk even once said that some gun deaths are “worth it” to preserve the Second Amendment.

So, my friend asked, how does he deserve our sympathy? He played a direct role in his own death. Too many kids have died of the gun violence Kirk promoted to spare him a feeling when that same gun violence came for him. Hoisted on his own petard, really. It’s like the old urban legend that the Marlboro Man, who buried smoking-cancer data, had himself died of lung cancer.

Here I interjected. “Or if Sen. Melissa Hortman, who supported murdering children, had herself been murdered?”

This gave my friend pause, to his credit.

I think his reaction to Kirk’s death was vile. I hate it.

I especially hate it in myself. In the dark recesses of my soul, I have no principles. I have black ooze. I hold it back with principles.

Here is one of my principles: Do not speak ill of the freshly dead.

Even if he is an enemy. Even if he brings about his own death. Every human being is a child of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. Everyone who has died deserves our love. That includes expressing respect without reservation. If, between the death and the funeral, you’re ever tempted to say, “I’m sorry he died, but…” stop. Go back. Delete the “but” and replace with a period.

There are limited exceptions to this rule of respect, but only at the extremes of humanity. (Generally, those who are actively planning murders, so that lives are directly saved by the villains’ deaths.) Even then, while we might justly celebrate the end of their evil influence, we still owe those villains our caritas and our prayers. You’d better believe I prayed for the souls of Osama bin Laden and George Tiller.²

This rule is an expression of the Christian charity that lies at the foundation of our civilization, and at the foundations of our souls.

Our civilization erected the taboo against speaking ill of the dead because it is hurtful to those in mourning. People in mourning deserve special solicitude, not just because they are suffering, and not even because they are suffering is born of love (which is inherently admirable)… but also because people in mourning are oversensitive, unstable, and prone to lashing out rashly, even violently. This is not a bull you goad if you want your civilization to live in peace. If you cannot be kind, you can at least be silent. (I have often been silent.)

Our spirits should avoid thinking ill of the dead because they’re dead. We may once have feared them because they could harm us, and (as Yoda taught us) fear leads to hatred. Hatred of this form is not good, but it happens. Once they’re dead, though, they can’t hurt us anymore. Nor can they defend themselves. Nor can we use righteous anger to stop them from inflicting more harm. Nothing good comes of holding on to that. In those early days after an enemy dies, deliberately thinking ill of him seems to serve only one purpose: to feed your hatred, for hate’s own sake. To justify—for example—a refusal to pray for his soul.

There will come a time when you (and civilization) have enough distance from your enemy for more objective evaluation, discussion, and (if necessary) healing to begin, but those early days after death are a dangerous time for everyone. Do not speak ill of the newly dead.

In this sense, it doesn’t matter whether Charlie Kirk brought about his own death. End of discussion.

On the other hand, if I leave the matter there, you’ll infer that I think he did bring about his own death.

Indeed, if I thought Kirk had received his just desserts, I would end this article right here. He died two days ago. His three-year-old daughter was there. When she heard the loud noise of the gunshot, she tried to run to her daddy because loud noises scare her. And she never saw him again. I wouldn’t do a truth-and-reconciliation on Charlie Kirk today if he were Slobadan Milošević.

However, the argument that Charlie Kirk brought about his own death doesn’t hold water. For his sake, and for the sake of our visibly fraying nation, it is right and just to show where the argument falls short.

Guns “Worth” Lives?

First, there is the time where Kirk said that gun deaths are “worth it” to protect the Second Amendment.

This sound callous, like we shouldn’t even bother doing anything, just let those kids die in school shootings. I think that’s the sense in which most people understood this sentence when they saw it clipped and quoted on social media. However, as another friend of mine wrote tonight, “Charlie Kirk doesn't generally talk in single sentences. He talks in essays.” Sure enough, the “worth it” quote came in a much more elaborate context—and, if you’re somebody who is judging Kirk’s soul on the strength of this quote, I’m going to ask you to read the whole thing:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: How's it going, Charlie? I'm Austin. I just had a question related to Second Amendment rights. We saw the shooting that happened recently and a lot of people are upset. But, I'm seeing people argue for the other side that they want to take our Second Amendment rights away. How do we convince them that it's important to have the right to defend ourselves and all that good stuff?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my mind.

The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.

Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — 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. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?

Now, Kirk’s view of the Second Amendment may be right. It may be wrong. What I don’t think can be said is that he is callous. He is not willing to let a bunch of kids die and then just wave it off as the cost of doing business. He wants to reduce killings, and he has proposals on how to bring it about. (His proposals may be right, they may be wrong, but they seem to be in earnest.) I don’t think you can condemn him for this passage without also condemning everyone who drives a car.

Now, he doesn’t put this the way I would put it. I would be more delicate. I would avoid the fatal phrase he wrote that got snipped out of context. Heck, just at a structural level, I would have clarified what Narnia has to do with his argument. But I am an internet writer. I spend a few minutes on every paragraph I compose. I reread the whole article twice, minimum, before publication. I inverted the outline of the article two-thirds of the way in and had to heavily rewrite. (I always still find at least one thing later on that I wish I could fix.)

I avoid extemporaneous speaking for precisely this reason. I’m terrible at it. I always feel I’m doing a deep disservice to the structure of my argument and the strength of my evidence. Kirk was speaking live, in person, to a real human. That was his great gift. But nobody alive can talk off-the-cuff as much as he did, for as long as he did, live on camera, without saying a few things that look very bad out of context, even if everyone is acting in good faith.

Of course, not everyone is acting in good faith. Kirk has also been dragged across the Internet today for allegedly saying that gay people should be stoned to death. This traces back to a discussion about Miss Rachel (starts around 57:00; alt link), who argued that she supported Pride Month because of Leviticus 19’s exhortation to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Kirk pointed out that this is a poor authority for her to cite, since Leviticus 18 calls for the stoning of gays, which—if Miss Rachel is treating Leviticus as authoritative—really undercuts her argument! Pretending that this means Kirk really wants to stone gays,³ and spreading that lie, is not a good-faith error.

(Personally, I don’t think this argument involved good philosophy or good theology, on either side. I think it’s stupid to say that “Pride Month is literally celebrating the sin of pride” and I think it’s silly to say that gay people should never celebrate Pride. I’ll just stipulate to the first nine, hyperlink-rich paragraphs of this Daniel Quinan article and move on.)

My friend Tom (the one who said “Charlie Kirk talks in essays”) looked through a number of other “damning” Kirk quotes and drew this conclusion:

Every time I've checked one of the single sentences, I've found it comes from an extended answer that—agree or disagree—isn't some kind of racist or unhinged position, but is instead a careful exploration of a complex problem that they're not giving a fair hearing to. …This doesn't mean there's nothing to criticize. But the criticisms based on single sentences that I've looked at have, entirely, fallen apart simply by finding a whole video or whole transcript and seeing that he's not being quoted in a contextually-accurate way.

I haven’t gone as deep as Tom did, but what I saw agrees with his conclusion.

Killed By A Gun He Defended?

Even if Kirk never specifically blew off gun deaths, though, he did fight against many proposed gun regulations, from the attempt to revive the federal Assault Weapons Ban to federal registration. Then he was killed by a gun! Regardless of his rhetoric, his actions in the legislative arena created the conditions for his own death!

…Right?

No. Charlie Kirk was killed by a single shot from a old-style Mauser .30-06 caliber hunting rifle.

This is not the actual gun that fired the shot; no images of that gun have been released. This is a different Mauser .30-06 bolt-action hunting rifle, manufactured in 1998. Guns.com currently has six such weapons for sale. This is the newest, cheapest, and most “military-looking” out of all of them.

This was not an assault rifle. It was not a sniper rifle. It wasn't even a semi-automatic. It wasn't a handgun. It wasn't a ghost gun. It had a bolt action. It was not a "weapon of war," unless you mean World War I. Here’s an ode to the “indestructible” .30-06 from 1962, singing its praises as a big-game rifle.

This is a hunting rifle. Charlie Kirk believed that the Second Amendment guaranteed Americans access to weapons of war to resist tyrannical government. His critics insisted that he was wrong, and that the only people who need guns are hunters and sportsmen. But this was a hunting gun.

If you repealed the Second Amendment and immediately imposed Canada's gun laws in the United States, Charlie Kirk still could have been shot and killed by this rifle.⁴ The only way to prevent this would have been to ban every gun in existence, then somehow enforce that ban. Not one of our peer nations has even attempted this, much less succeeded at it.

Once we know more about the shooter, we may find that there were interventions we could have done on the shooter himself (rather than the gun). That's a healthy conversation to have, once we have all the facts. (I don’t know about Charlie Kirk, but I’m pro-red flag laws, and I’ll be interested to know whether a red flag law might have been useful here.) As of today, though, there’s no justification for saying (or thinking) that Kirk’s successful advocacy for gun rights contributed in any way to his own murder. Even if Kirk had been firmly anti-Second Amendment and successfully gotten it repealed and most guns banned, this gun still would have been available to most anyone who wanted him dead. There’s no poetic justice here. Just blood and a child’s tears.

Believed Evil Things?

Finally, many argue that Kirk earned his own death because, even understood and interpreted in context, he believed and said bad things. For example, a friend-of-a-friend wrote this comment on Facebook yesterday:

Another:

Another:

This was all just one thread. I have good friends in the center or the left who honestly don’t think this sort of celebration is happening, except in extreme online fringes, but it is certainly happening, even among normies. The argument here is simple: Charlie Kirk “tempted fate” by saying and believing things that made left-wing people angry, or which they identified as hateful. He “reaped what he sowed.” He “FAFO”’d.

I trust that simply putting this argument to print is enough to show why it doesn’t hold water. Charlie Kirk was a conservative. He believed, for the most part, what most conservatives believe. (Note: most conservatives do not want people like John O. in camps; Kirk did not.) He talked about those things imperfectly, but far better than most conservatives (or most progressives). He was not up there spewing rage and invective. If you think that’s who he was, watch these videos:

That’s less a debate, more an interview, really, but still.

And, most poignantly: “It’s so important to find our disagreements respectfully, because, when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens”:

This is not the face of a monster. It is the face of a man you might find very annoying, whom you might disagree with both as to substance and as to style. (We will not do so here, because we do not speak ill of the recently dead.) But he really was trying to change hearts and minds through dialogue, a rare and valuable exception to the online grifters who just want to gin up online rage.

Now, I was pretty far to Kirk’s left, because Kirk was consistently conservative. I am not. I think conservatism has gotten pretty sick in the past decade. I tried to convince people not to vote for Donald Trump in 2024. Although I agree with conservative sexual ethics, including on homosexuality, I just admitted a few paragraphs ago that I think Pride Month can be good. Nevertheless, I still share probably 75% of my beliefs with Charlie Kirk. Some of my beliefs certainly include some of the beliefs for which Charlie Kirk was most hated.

So, if I were shot in the neck and bled out in front of my children, would I have been “reaping what I sowed”?

Does every conservative “tempt fate” by saying what they believe?

Half this country?

I know what Seth C. would say:

Yes.

Those of you who have read this far, however, will need just a few moments’ reflection to realize that only Calvinists and psychopaths think there would be some justice in murdering half the U.S. population. Since all conservatives do not deserve to die, Charlie Kirk did not “reap what he sowed.”

It does not matter whether Charlie Kirk deserved to die, and, at the same time, it is a calumny to say he did. Those who even think it should be ashamed.⁵

Shameless

I spent much of yesterday trying to defuse some of the pathologies I saw unfolding on both the Right and the Left.

Specifically, I tried to show my friends on the Right—which is violently angry (this is understandable)—that their enemy is not “The Left,” but rather certain individuals on the Left who were happy Charlie Kirk was dead (and who, by perfectly logical extension, presumably want all conservatives equally dead). I tried to show that most people, even on the Left, thought Charlie Kirk was a flawed but fundamentally decent man whose death is not just an assault on democratic self-government, but a terrible tragedy as well. There were some great examples yesterday of Leftists whom I dislike acting correctly. Bernie Sanders had to dig real deep to find anything nice to say about Kirk (“smart and effective communicator”)—but he got there. He did not speak ill of the freshly dead. He, like these other examples, acted with honor yesterday. Many Left-wingers have cultivated such decent, respectable bubbles that they don’t even see others on the Left acting dishonorably.

Meanwhile, I tried to show my friends on the Left—which, despite its official condemnation of the killing, has launched a campaign of invective and selective quotation against Kirk in the last twenty-four hours—that Charlie Kirk was a lot more than the worst things ever attributed to him. I tried to show examples of Kirk engaging in respectful civic discourse, like those I posted above. Plus, my examples of left-wing writers acting honorably was also intended to show my left-wing friends how to condemn a killing without adding a “but.” Without saying, “I condemn Kirk’s death, even though he was a hate-filled man who got what he deserved, because, thank God, I’m not as those other men are.”⁶

It didn’t work. None of it worked.

My day ended with multiple friends (some of whom had liked my post) sharing another post from a college professor. This professor once published a screed about why she had hoped (and still wished) that Donald Trump had been successfully assassinated in Butler. Kirk reported on this and clearly hoped she would face discipline. This professor then blamed Kirk for the ugly harassment that followed, once MAGA found out that she wanted their candidate dead. (Kirk formally opposed such harassment, although it is a sadly predictable side effect of honest reporting these days.) The professor went on to blame Kirk for his own death and called it “revolting” to mourn for him.

These friends of mine saw the professor’s post as important “context” to Kirk’s murder, showing his “abhorrence” (as one of them put it).

Other people—people I really like and respect—shared the pseudo-condolence posts that followed the traditional, “I condemn it even though he got what he deserved,” pattern. Sometimes, this happened even after they had seen and affirmed what I had shared to try to head this off.

Another acquaintance reamed me out for not doing something similar after Sen. Melissa Hortman’s assassination, and made imprecations that I was on the assassin’s team in that case because I am white, “Christian,” and “pro-life.” Yes, he put the latter two in scare quotes. (I did post after Hortman’s murder, but on Twitter, so I guess he didn’t see it.⁷)

Meanwhile, a Right-wing friend was annoyed at me for bending over backwards to make the Left “look good.”

In short, I failed. I didn’t just fail with the anonymous crowd of rage moppets on Twitter or BlueSky. I failed on Facebook, with longtime friends.

So… I think we’re cooked.

Maybe that’s just a mood. I hope so.

But, last night, at the end of that long day, as I was trying to talk myself out of despair, I saw this poll from YouGov:

I’ve said for a long time that the Left has a genuine, asymmetrical problem with dead conservatives, so I guess it’s nice to have empirical confirmation? Except it doesn’t feel nice at all.

Obviously—obviously—when significant portions of the population (on both sides, but weighted one way) think their non-violent ideological opponents deserve death, then we cannot have a country. “I condemn political violence even though my enemies deserve to die” is not a sustainable position. A few might white-knuckle their way through it, but no nation can.

What was the epigraph to the Civil War post, again? Oh, yes:

We are divorced because we have hated each other so.

—Mary Chesnut (March 11, 1861)

Or, as Mary would put it today: We’re cooked.

Coda

However.

Hopelessness is no excuse for surrendering to the black ooze.

We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves. For, my lords, it may well prove that we ourselves shall perish utterly in a black battle far from the living lands; so that even if Barad-dûr be thrown down, we shall not live to see a new age. But this, I deem, is our duty. And better so than to perish nonetheless—as we surely shall, if we sit here—and know as we die that no new age shall be.

—Aragorn Elessar (March 16, 3019)⁸

You will remember my dear friend from the beginning of this article, the one who said he hadn’t prayed for Charlie Kirk. When he said what he said, I did not reply by reeling off every idea in this article at him rapid-fire, Kirk-style.

I did not need to.

Every muscle in my body tensed, I told him, “That’s hatred.”

Then he sagged and said, “It was wrong of me. I know.”

That’s why I love him.

Next: The monthly Worthy Reads links post, originally scheduled for yesterday, then rescheduled for next Tuesday, is now re-rescheduled for next Thursday.

1. or she. I’m not telling you.

2. Moreover, I should have waited two weeks before posting “A Roman Memory,” about Cardinal Law.

3. He does, at the end, refer to “God’s perfect law in sexual matters,” but I think any reasonable person should take this extemporaneous remark, in the context of his argument against Miss Rachel, as confirmation of the general Christian condemnation of homosexual acts, not a call for returning to the specific legal precepts of Leviticus, which has been rare among Christians since the Apostles recognized the Church’s right to amend the Mosaic Law in Acts 15. After all, I’m pretty sure Charlie Kirk wore mixed fabrics. Elsewhere, he insisted he has no hate but only love for the LGBT community, and he endorsed all the normal things Christians endorse when talking about Leviticus: there’s a distinction between the moral law and the ritual law, Jesus’s New Covenant supplanted the Old, we look to tradition for guidance, and Christ affirmed that marriage is between one man and one woman.

4. Hunting rifles like this must be licensed and registered in Canada, through a PAL or POL license. However, anyone can obtain the license, except people with records of crime or involuntary commitment to a mental hospital. (The U.S. has similar restrictions on criminals and the mentally ill owning guns.) Canadian sportsmen have to jump through more hoops than Americans do to get a gun, like a gun safety course and a 28-day waiting period for a first-time licensee, but none impose substantive obstacles for someone who has already decided to use a gun to commit murder.

5. I have thought it (though not about Kirk) and I am ashamed. For the record, the hateful black ooze in my own soul is both a Calvinist and a psychopath.

6. I don’t want to put these people on blast, because at least they weren’t actively celebrating Kirk’s death. Indeed, their messages were largely intended to quell celebrations of his death, which is good, even if so badly misguided it ended up repulsive. I’ll just put a couple example excerpts in this footnote.

Here’s one:

Kirk himself talked about how gun deaths are inevitable in order to uphold the second amendment. For a lot of people this will simply be a case of him getting a taste of his own medicine. Some on the other side of his politics will celebrate his death, but most will simply justify it because the machine he helped create ultimately destroyed him.

For me though, it comes down to the fact that I don’t support the machine to begin with.

And because of that, I cannot ever support any of the lives it takes. My heart is truly broken for Charlie Kirk, all of those who loved him, and also the thousand who witnessed his death. I cannot imagine the insurmountable pain and trauma they are currently going through.

I keep asking myself how can I be crying for someone who upheld the very system that ultimately killed him? I don’t really know, but something inside of me grieves the loss of his life deeply.

Another:

Charlie Kirk believed and said horrible things—vile, disgusting things—about people like me, about people like my family, about people I love. And I don’t think he deserved this. He said gun deaths are worth having the Second Amendment. He believed that they’re worth having the prevalence of guns that we have in this country. I think he’s wrong. I don’t think that his death was worth it… The key difference between people like me and people like Charlie Kirk is that I don’t think it’s worth it. …I don’t think I can say that I want a better world for everyone, if “everyone” doesn’t include people like Charlie Kirk. I want to protect them, too, and I want them to live full, happy lives, and I will continue to try to work for that.

7. I posted in different places after Hortman’s death because the dynamic of her murder was so different. The Right did not have many people—at least not in my bubble?—who were glad she was dead or celebrated her death, even though she was certainly no angel. (At least, I feel comfortable making this claim: Melissa Hortman was not a better person than Charlie Kirk.)

Instead, the Right twisted itself in pretzels to try to shift responsibility for the killing. They convinced themselves that assassin Vance Boelter was an agent of the Left, and that this was some kind of complex false-flag operation.

Nearly all of my writing about Hortman’s death, then, was debunking those conspiracy theories wherever I saw them pop up, largely by retweeting the fine Dave Thul, who did admirable work in this department, plus stray Facebook comments on other friends’ walls. None of it merited a blog post.

I certainly didn’t have to write a blog post saying, “Sen. Hortman was not at fault in her own murder,” because, at least in my bubble, I never saw a single person suggest that, and I don’t believe it ever occurred to me that anyone would.

8. I have a premonition that we’re going to start seeing this quote around here often.