Like many news stories before it, the assassination of American conservative commentator Charlie Kirk has drawn out the depraved thinking of politically active social media users. I’m referring to those on the Left who can’t summon the basic decency to resist revelling in the 31-year-old’s death. They don’t seem to see that a man being shot in the neck while debating gun laws, whatever the motive of his killer, is the most egregious censorship, making it a focal point for those of us concerned about free speech.
Rather, they celebrate a kind of poetic irony that they see in the slaying – that the father-of-two Kirk was a vociferous supporter of the right to bear arms guaranteed by the US Constitution’s Second Amendment. Of particular interest is the idea that Kirk was comfortable with paying the price of gun deaths, for many synonymous with the mass shooting of unarmed citizens as opposed to gang violence, in order to preserve gun rights.
The source of this belief about Kirk is a quote from the man himself: “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 is drivel. But 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.”
Notice the use of the word “unfortunately”, because it’s something those celebrating his death seem to have missed. Note also his qualifier – “so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”.
Anybody who’s paid a second’s worth of attention to the American Right will know the Amendment central to these rights: the First, which guarantees freedom of expression.
It’s easy to read Kirk’s words as defending a necessary evil that will no doubt come with painful costs which are the price of non-negotiable freedoms.
But nobody engaged in this self-righteous revelry cares about such details. How befitting of our social media age it is to seize upon a distortion of speech, turn it into a meme that serves political rhetoric and deploy it as evidence of justice after a fatal outburst of barbarism.
They don’t care for what is actually being said, but what can be read into the words spoken. At no point in the quote above does Kirk specify his ideal victims of the gun deaths he accepts as realistic.
It’s tragic that he didn’t have the foresight to specify something like “and I hope none of those deaths will be based upon the victim’s politics, because that is always unacceptable”.
However, it’s difficult to see how an honest analysis of Kirk’s career would give the impression that he was fine with people being shot dead for their political views when he made a career out of open debate against those with whom he disagreed.
It’s also hard to see how he could hold such views while being such a strong supporter of the First Amendment. I’d like to know how many of those flirting with the notion that Kirk deserved this fate are drivers.
Do those motorists deserve to die in car crashes because they believe in a freedom that last year came with the cost of 39,345 US deaths in 2024? Of course they don’t.
In the spirit of Charlie Kirk, it is worth pointing out that there is something positive to take from the diabolical reactions to his death. A free speech stalwart should be relieved that these strange people are allowed to express such views. It lets the rest of us know our enemies, hear their arguments and see their limited intellects.
How grimly ironic that the very principles which allow them to express such sickness of thought were so ardently defended by Kirk, whose voice has been silenced forever by the ultimate suppression.
