Charlie Kirk’s last stand

An American tragedy

Charlie Kirk should be alive. So should Melissa and Mark Hortman in Minnesota.

Political assassination is never a moral victory for the opposing ideology’s side.

There is a quote attributed to Charlie Kirk circulating in the wake of his murder today:

“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.”

It is a tragedy that Kirk is not here to see the obvious humanity of the rebuttal. The argument he lost was his own life. And for his widow and young children, the deal is not remotely prudent.

Charlie Kirk should be alive to say whatever he wants about transgender rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, diversity, and gun control. When he was shot, he was arguing about guns, telling the Utah audience that shooting violence in America is mostly from “gangs.”

And despite being the leading mouthpiece for far-right youth ideology, his death underlines the lifesaving validity of everything he fought against.

There is, of course, no human life worth sacrificing to preserve a quill-scrawled line written three hundred years ago about forming a colonial militia. Charlie Kirk’s grieving family joins the thousands of shattered American families each year in understanding the most obvious flaw to his argument: There are no acceptable gun deaths. If the cost of preserving a musket-specific amendment to an already-upended Constitution is Americans being slaughtered in public with harrowing regularity, then that amendment has run its course in the reality of modern America.

That a group of MAGA loyalists in a Fire Engine Red state were powerless to defend their own hero against a bad guy with a gun means it’s time for the far right to agree we need to make it more difficult for bad guys to get guns.

Charlie Kirk was shot in a state with among the most lax gun control laws in the nation, where teenagers 18 and older can openly carry a gun without a permit. Without a permit. When they turn 21, they can carry the gun loaded.

It is astonishing that it is legal for Kirk’s killer to buy a murder weapon, carry it to a large public gathering space and brandish it in the crowd.

If the shooter was completely within his rights until the moment he pulled the trigger, the rights are an accessory to murder.

And so, in his memory, and in memory of all Americans killed by the dogmatic, NRA-funded belief of an American gun’s right over an American citizen’s, please join me in raising money for Everytown.

Let’s end this horrific cycle. Enough.