About a week ago, Charlie Kirk died. He was shot from a range of about 140 yards by, as far as prosecutors know, a Mauser Model 98, .30-06 caliber bolt-action rifle with a mounted scope. According to text messages between the suspect, Tyler James Robinson, and his romantic partner slash roommate, the scope was a “$2k scope.”

The Mauser Model 98 is not a modern weapon. Originally designed in 1898 (hence the name), it is a simple bolt-action hunting rifle, described by the manufacturer as “the forefather of all modern bolt action rifles,” that holds five rounds. Apparently, Robinson got it from his grandfather, though it’s not clear whether it was lent or stolen. The gun, found later in the woods by law enforcement, contained one spent round and three live rounds, indicating that it was fired only once. “Judging from today,” Robinson wrote in one text, “I’d say grandpa’s gun does just fine.

Assuming Robinson didn’t steal the gun, there was nothing illegal about possessing it. Utah is what’s called a “constitutional carry” state, which is shorthand for the kind of lawmakers who think that any restriction on gun ownership is an affront. What this means is that anyone over the age of 21 — Robinson is 22 — can openly carry a loaded gun, not restricted to handguns, anywhere except specific restricted areas. Firearms still had to be concealed on college campuses until the passage of HB128 earlier this year, which allowed anyone with a concealed carry permit to now openly carry on state college campuses.

It’s not clear whether Robinson was properly permitted or allowed to carry the gun on the UVU campus, but it’s also certainly not obvious that he wasn’t. University security reserved the right to check people’s permits if they saw them open carrying, but other than that, he probably could have walked around with a functional, loaded, WWI-era German rifle slung over his shoulder without arousing suspicion. In fact, up until he pulled the trigger, the most illegal thing he probably did was climb onto the roof of a building. Because we live in a country — a country of people like Charlie Kirk’s creation — where you’re not supposed to think that a man carrying a gun on a crowded college campus is suspicious.

Let’s talk about the idea of carrying a gun in public, because it’ll be important later on. Carrying a gun in public is a threat. I’ve been lambasted for this idea in the past and I’m sure that won’t be the last time, but I’ll say it again because I think it’s important:

Carrying a gun in public is, inherently, a threat.

We’re not talking about “responsible” gun owners who have guns at home in the case of home invasion. I personally don’t think breaking into someone’s house and stealing their stuff is a crime worthy of being killed over, but that’s a different discussion. And we’re not talking about hunters who have rifles locked in cases in the basement and ammo locked up somewhere else, only to be loaded into the gun once the Mossy Oak is donned and the hunt begins.

If you carry a gun in public — in your glovebox, your purse, your waistband, whatever — you are deciding that at some point during your day, the circumstances might arise where you should kill someone. What are those circumstances? What’s the rubric by which you judge whether it’s time to start killing people? Are you of sound mind? Are you tired or tipsy or irritated? Doesn’t matter. You’re in charge of deciding whether the people around you live or die, based on criteria that exist only in your head.

The Right loves to pretend that this is not the case. In the argument (that I started) about this online, I was told over and over that carrying a gun isn’t inherently violent and that most gun owners are law-abiding. There’s a pervasive “use it or lose it” idea that if you don’t exercise your right to bear arms in a flagrant and conspicuous way, you’re more likely to lose those rights, for reasons no one has adequately explained. And of course there are the snarky memes about how “trigger discipline is the only gun control I support.”

But everyone’s a law-abiding citizen until they’re not. Everyone’s got trigger discipline until they don’t. Everyone keeps their cool until they stop keeping their cool, and in the words of the comic Jim Jeffries, “from time to time, we all get sad.”

Sometimes, people see a car turning around in their driveway and decide that that’s the moment to take a life. Sometimes a man pulls a gun because Popeyes is out of chicken sandwiches. Sometimes a police officer shoots at his own car with a man inside because he thought an acorn was a gunshot. He even claimed to have been shot himself. By the acorn.

And sometimes a 42-year-old Army veteran, the kind of person you’d hope could be trusted to make smart gun-related decisions, decides that an 11-year-old boy deserves to die for ringing his doorbell.

This is what happens in a society where 1) almost anyone can cheaply acquire a gun without training or screening and carry it around everywhere they go and 2) some people are impulsive idiots who can’t be trusted with lethal weapons. The second point is true of every society in the world. The first is true of the United States and basically nowhere else.

That’s what Charlie Kirk wanted. He said that gun deaths would be unavoidable in an armed populace — the most heavily armed populace in the world, in fact — and he thought that was a good thing. The quote of his that has been floated around the most since his death, much to the chagrin of conservative commentators, is this:

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.

Well, there you have it. We have the Second Amendment, and despite the screeching from the Right every time there’s a shooting about how the Left are going to use said shooting to take away gun rights, the Second Amendment is as steadfast and well-defended as ever. And we also have “some” gun deaths every single year. Almost 50,000 of them, in fact, about the same as car deaths. About 125 a day. And a week ago, one of them was Charlie Kirk’s.

Charlie Kirk’s gun death is only unique in the sense that he was kind of famous and in the sense that it was so ubiquitously published. If you haven’t seen the video, it’s fairly graphic. Charlie is in the middle of deflecting a question about gun violence (an ironic twist that’s either cruel or poetic depending who you ask), invoking gangs, and falsely blaming transgender people for “too many [mass shootings] to count” (the number is five).

A dot appears on the left side of his neck as the bullet enters. Almost instantly the life disappears from his eyes. He slumps back and to the side. A fountain of blood surges out of his neck and down his white shirt — not the clean, Hollywood trickle of a hero bleeding out in the snow to sad violin music, but a chaotic gush as though someone had turned on a spigot connected to his carotid artery. A seemingly impossible amount of blood covers half his shirt. The video ends.

I saw the video a few minutes after hearing he had been shot, and I knew he was dead. He wasn’t declared dead until probably half an hour later, and in the interim, someone from the Turning Point media team said that he was “hanging in there” or something similar, but I don’t think that was ever true.

There is a macabre joke among EMTs that “no one ever dies in an ambulance” because only a doctor can declare someone dead, and I happen to know from watching doctors react to TV shows on YouTube that declaring someone dead is a somewhat laborious process. It involves confirming the identity of the patient, checking for responses to verbal and tactile stimuli (doing things that a living person would find very painful, like rubbing knuckles on the sternum or pinching the nail beds), checking for heart sounds, feeling for a pulse in various locations, looking and listening for breathing, checking the pupils for a response to light, and finally declaring the person dead.

So what actually happened is that Charlie was shot, bundled into an ambulance, taken to a hospital, seen by a doctor, and only then declared dead. In reality, a human being can bleed out of their carotid artery to the point of irreparable brain damage in about two minutes. Charlie was unrecoverably dead before they picked him up off the ground.

There’s a reason I’m going into so much detail about the video and the nature of his death, and that is that every year, 50,000 people go through the same thing. That’s about 125 people a day. Some of them shoot themselves in the head in the bathtub of their studio apartments. A few hundred every year are shot over road rage. Around a hundred of them are shot by toddlers who found poorly secured guns in their homes. Some of them are shot in gang violence, dumped outside hospital ERs, and die on the surgical table six hours later.

They include children. Some of them died inside a school in Uvalde in 2022 while 400 law enforcement officers stood outside, making no attempt to breach the school and exercising their Supreme-Court-given right not to protect the general population.

Some of them died inside a Catholic church in Minneapolis, mere days before Kirk died.

But in every case, whether the victim was a violent gang member or a toddler, whether it took place in the street or someone’s house or a movie theater or a church or a school, the story was the same. The sound of a gunshot. The sudden and unnatural appearance of a hole in a human body. An overwhelming gush of blood. Limp, gray skin. Hollow eyes. An ambulance ride, no matter how futile. A declaration of death. Mourning teachers and pastors and friends and parents and husbands and wives and children.

Every one of those 50,000 people who die every year — deaths that people like Charlie Kirk insist are simply the price of freedom — died violently and gruesomely and covered in blood. Most of them suffered. There is no graceful way to die of a gunshot wound.

Charlie’s death was not unique because he was unique. Bloviating right-wing pundits who think that they’re “winning” a “debate” by spewing a fire hose of bad faith arguments and logical fallacies are a dime a dozen. It wasn’t unique because it happened in front of a lot of people, or because he left behind a grieving family. It was only unique because you had to watch it happen.

The ubiquity of the video is the only reason I can think of for the Right’s response, which has been nearly universal, nearly instantaneous, and fully insane. That response was to decide, as one hivemind, that Charlie Kirk is a martyr. Charlie was just a fresh-faced young man, doing his best to provide leadership and guidance to the youth of America from a foundation of Christian faith. So the story goes. I’ve seen comparisons to Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. (whom Charlie hated), and even Jesus Christ.

Normally, you only see the Right in lockstep like this when the Dear Leader tells them to think a certain way, like when his tangibly disintegrating brain decided that the US should own Greenland and suddenly half the country could think of nothing else.

That doesn’t seem to be the case here. Trump tweeted something vague on the day that Kirk died, but otherwise doesn’t seem to give a shit. When asked “how are you holding up” by the kind of softball reporters Trump will allow within a hundred yards of him, Trump said “I think very good” and then instantly pivoted to showing everyone the cool trucks that are working on his latest vanity project. In the words of Jimmy Kimmel, “that’s not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

No, it’s everyone else that’s lost their minds over it.

Laura Loomer’s response was thus:

J. D. Vance, who canceled his trip to honor 9/11 victims in order to host Charlie’s podcast, said,

“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.”

Greg Abbott called for investigation into a teacher who called Kirk’s killing “karma.” He, Marco Rubio, and others called for revoking the visas and deporting noncitizens who publicly celebrated Kirk’s death.

Pete Hegseth, the former TV host, accused domestic abuser, white-supremacist-tattoo-haver, and medium-functioning alcoholic currently massaging his ego with the made-up title Secretary of War, had this to say:

The other unusual thing about Kirk’s death and the subsequent lionization by the right is that for once, their bluster is being acted upon.

Texas has already fired more than 100 teachers for social media posts associated with Kirk’s death. Abbott claims that they crossed the line into “endorsing assassination or inciting violence,” providing no evidence to that effect.

Karen Attiah was fired over her Charlie Kirk posts on social media in which she categorically did not celebrate his death, but expressed cynicism about the callousness of the political Right toward violence in this country.

Jimmy Kimmel had his show suspended indefinitely after saying the following on his Monday, September 15, episode:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

But not only did FCC Chair Brendan Carr insist that ABC pull Kimmel off the air, he also suggested that Kimmel should issue a direct apology to Kirk’s family and make a personal donation to both the family and Turning Point USA.

You may have noticed a trend here: the Right is pretending to be very upset over people “celebrating” Kirk’s death, but I’ve had a lot of trouble finding examples of anyone doing that. Lots of people posted some of Kirk’s more odious quotes in the immediate aftermath of his death, often with no commentary attached, and conservatives got mad about that. As someone said somewhere in the deluge of information I’ve been poring through for this post, “the only thing Kirk had in common with Jesus is that conservatives hate when you quote them directly.

One teacher referred to his death as “karma.” Chelsea Wolfe, a transgender Olympian (Kirk was famously anti-trans-rights), posted a photo of herself smiling with the caption “Being a Nazi is completely optional btw. He didn’t have to do all that but he did and now he’s dead. Don’t live your life in a way that the world is better following your death.” The New York Post called that a “vile celebration” (it’s not) and referred to Kirk as a “conservative influencer famed for inviting those with opposing views to debate him.” An Australian MP said she was glad that Kirk’s “extremist” messaging would no longer be spread.

What I expected, though, was a flood of screenshots all over Reddit and Twitter of people “celebrating” Kirk’s death so that conservatives could pretend they cared about decorum and decency the way they always pretend to care about such things any time the tables turn in a slightly unfavorable way. Those apparently don’t exist. People on the right calling for violence against liberals? No shortage of those, both recently and over the last decade.

But similar collages of leftists gleefully singing “ding dong the witch is dead” while dancing on an oversized cardboard cutout of Kirk’s head? I’ve crawled through the more repugnant parts of Xitter and Reddit in search of the kind of frothing indignation that the Right keeps on hand for situations like this. Haven’t seen one yet.

It feels like rote futility at this point to point out the hypocrisy of the Right. Hypocrisy is baked right into the identity of the entire ideology. Every accusation is a confession. Every breathless faux panic about what the Left might do should they take power is revealed immediately to have been a fantasy about what the Right will do, and have done, the second the power fell to them. They either know they’re being hypocrites and don’t care, or they’re too stupid to realize what they’re doing, and it doesn’t really matter which. But I feel obligated to record some examples nonetheless.

Two months prior to Kirk’s death, Loomer called Kirk a “charlatan” and “political opportunist” who engaged in “mental gymnastics” and “stabs Trump in the back.” She called herself a proud Islamophobe. She said that Islam is a cancer and complained in 2017 about being late for work because she couldn’t find a non-Muslim cab driver. She said that if Kamala Harris became president, the White House would “smell like curry” and that White House press conferences would be handled through a call center, which even bothered fellow conservative harpy Marjorie Taylor Greene. She referred to wounded Palestinian children receiving treatment in the US as “Islamic invaders.” She has promoted the baseless claim that 9/11 was an inside job. She amplified the conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets, a story that was invented from whole cloth by some dipshit in Springfield and then swallowed and regurgitated unquestioningly by the entirety of the political Right, none of whom have ever apologized. Vance actually defended the blatant lies he’d been spreading, saying “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

I could go on forever just quoting people like the ones in that screenshot above, who are so upset about political violence that they want to commit a lot of political violence about it.

Joey Mannarino once said “I will never believe a victim of rape again in my life no matter the verdict in court.” He also called for trans people to be “locked away and studied” after the shooting at the Minnesota church.

Elon Musk, speaking at a far right rally in Britain, warned the British people that “violence is coming…fight back or die.” He repeatedly performed a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. He’s made Nazi and Holocaust jokes for years.

Charlie Kirk once said that black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

Charlie Kirk once said that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”

Charlie Kirk once said, “The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.”

Charlie Kirk once said that “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

And when two Minnesota lawmakers were assassinated earlier this year, did conservatives call for databases to be collected of anyone who didn’t take the shooting seriously enough? No, they mocked the victims and blamed liberals in ludicrous conspiracy theories.

Because this is the world that Charlie Kirk wanted. This is the world they all wanted. Conservatives have been slavering for years over the idea of an America with no laws, no rules, no regulations, no “politically correct” buzzkills telling them that they shouldn’t tell insensitive jokes.

No “woke” employment policies telling them they can’t restrict their hiring to white men with ostrich-skin boots and Gadsden flag stickers sandwiched between Blue Lives Matter and Punisher stickers on the backs of their lifted pickups, which by the way are legally allowed to be so tall that they don’t even have to look at the fourth grader they just splattered in the crosswalk they didn’t feel like stopping at because THIS IS AMERICA.

Conservatives have been unapologetic champions of political violence for decades. You can buy “terrorist hunting license” stickers on Amazon right now. You can buy “All Lives Splatter” stickers with a little drawing of a car running over a stick figure and the text “nobody cares about your protest.” Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, even signed a law in 2021 intended to protect people who hit protesters with their cars. The Governor’s office called it an “unapologetic stand for public safety.”

Look no further than Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse was the then-teenager who drive from his home in Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin and killed two unarmed people participating in the riots/protests there. He’s since met Donald Trump, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, made several appearances with Kirk in TPUSA productions, been offered internships by Republican politicians, and appeared in a video game. When he came onstage at a Turning Point USA event, he was treated like a Hollywood A-lister.

Kyle Rittenhouse is venerated by the Right because he represents the dream that so many millions of them have, but so few have actually acted on: the desire to kill people who disagree with you. That’s why 2A advocates claim it’s so important to keep their guns in order to stand up to tyranny, but when real tyranny happens in the form of Trump’s new Gestapo Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or even when imaginary tyranny happens in the form of Joe Biden daring to exist, they don’t actually do anything.

They brandish their guns and dress up the way a child might think a special forces soldier would dress up and they yell at government officials and they light off illegal fireworks while simultaneously claiming to care about the rule of law and they scream at cops while wearing “back the blue” shirts and they do basically nothing because they don’t actually care about the law or their rights or protecting property or self-defense or resisting tyranny.

Look at these fucking dorks. That’s not a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, that’s a couple of dipshits with $1500 to spare doing their best to intimidate the people around them because something mildly inconvenient happened to them.

This is the world Charlie Kirk wanted. When he stood up for gun rights and talked about “a few” (50,000) people dying every year in order to stand up for Second Amendment rights, this is what he was defending. He was defending a world where racial slurs can be slung around with impunity on social media. Where you can carry a police rifle on public streets in order to show everyone whose path you cross that you’re desperate for the chance to cosplay Judge Dredd at a moment’s notice, but where you’re more likely to use that gun on yourself or a drive-thru employee than to stop a crime or defend yourself or prevent masked men claiming to be federal agents from throwing the nearest, brownest person into an unmarked car.

Kirk wanted a world of impotent, pathetic, insecure men whom no one fears or respects and whose only recourse is to strongarm the lesser-armed into getting their way, and that’s what he and his cohorts got. They’re not firing reporters and teachers and taking Kimmel off the air and grandstanding on the internet because they care about Charlie Kirk or reasonable discourse or common decency or decorum — that ship sailed when Donald Trump came down that escalator ten years ago. They’re firing them for not bending the knee to a person and a party that has earned nothing but contempt. A hollow shell of an ideology draped in a patchwork quilt of religion and patriotism and personal liberty, propped up by nothing but bluster and a feeble attempt at outrage.

This is the world Charlie Kirk wanted.

So what’s next?

There will be a public funeral, probably, where conservatives line up to see who can summon the most tearful goodbyes for a man they never actually cared about or even knew (RFK, Jr. claims to have met Kirk, appeared on his podcast, and become “soulmates” and “spiritual brothers” with him … in 2001, when Kirk was seven years old). There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Someone mildly famous will say something like “this seems like a lot of fanfare for a podcaster when you didn’t seem to care about the 50,000 other people who died of guns last year” and then the Right will demand that that person by publicly executed (another thing Charlie wanted). The Right will circulate corny AI memes of Kirk and Jesus with matching assault rifles or something.

And then what? My most cynical impulse is that the Right will use this as their Reichstag Fire moment. The Reichstag fire, for the uninitiated, was an arson attack on the German parliament building in 1933, right after Adolf Hitler took office. Hitler blamed it on Communist dissidents and used it as an excuse to suspend civil liberties and initiate a “ruthless confrontation” with the Communists, which was the first stepping stone toward the authoritarianism of the Nazi party.

Historians don’t totally agree on whether the young Communist Marinus van der Lubbe started the fire on his own, whether he was acting as a part of a broader Communist plot, or whether the Germans started the fire themselves as the pretense for taking power, but it doesn’t really matter. What’s obvious is that Hitler wanted a catalyst to take charge and the fire gave him one.

In fact, if you take a close look at that collage of Xitter posts above, you’ll see that one of them is from white supremacist and general shithead Matt Forney, who called the death of Kirk “America’s Reichstag fire” and said that it should be the impetus for arresting and stifling everyone left of the aisle. It’s unclear at this point whether the Republican party is aware that they are definitely the Nazis in this metaphor and they’re happy with that, or whether they’re too stupid to notice — given Forney’s history, I’m inclined to believe the former — but that post essentially boils down to “remember how the Nazis took power? We should do that.”

Already, there have been calls to ban trans people from owning guns. How that would possibly be enforced I don’t know, other than doing really detailed background checks (Republicans don’t want those) or making people pull their pants down in gun stores to confirm that they have the right kind of genitals (Republicans…might want that?) Obviously, there have been the aforementioned calls to silence, fire, and otherwise persecute anyone who doesn’t see Charlie for the cherubic beacon of traditional masculinity and American hopefulness that he apparently was.

Trump is too busy with his trucks to care about how to proceed — when asked on Fox & Friends how Americans could “come back together” and “fix this country” he responded “I couldn’t care less.“

Turning Point USA will go on and probably get a lot of donations or ad money or whatever as a result of this. Apparently there’s been a huge surge in requests to start new chapters since Charlie’s death. Now that both of its founders are dead of preventable causes that they both mocked (Bill Montgomery of COVID-19 in July of 2020 and Charlie Kirk of a law-abiding gun owner in September of 2025), it needed new leadership.

Obviously, an organization like TPUSA wouldn’t indulge in crass nepotism or diversity hiring given how adamantly against such things Charlie was, so they turned to the capable hands of…

Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, whose qualifications include being Miss Arizona USA 2012 and running a Christian streetwear brand.

The likelier scenario, I hope, is that there won’t be a Reichstag fire moment because as I pointed out previously, every single member of this movement is a spineless, unprincipled, hypocritical weasel who couldn’t find a logically coherent argument if you tattooed it on their forehead. They don’t care about anything except whatever new thing they can pretend to be outraged about, and in a couple of weeks none of them will mention Charlie’s name again. They have neither the organizational skills or the strength of conviction to do anything. If Trump doesn’t talk about it, the Right forgets (notice no one’s mentioned Greenland in a while?)

Do I feel bad for anyone in this scenario? I feel bad for Charlie’s kids in the abstract. It’s not their fault their dad was such a reprehensible person, they’re very young, and they’ll now have to grow up with a lot of baggage attached to who he was. I can hope that they won’t turn out like him, but who knows? Charlie wanted to live in a world where many thousands of children have their parents violently ripped away from them for no reason, and here we are. What a fun experiment.

I don’t feel bad for Erika. She knew who he was when she married him, and she’ll be raking in the faux-sympathy cash now. Erika, a woman who once said that “boss babe culture is completely antithetical to the Gospel,” will be the new boss babe CEO and Chair of the Board for an organization that only exists to make ignorant, bad-faith arguments designed to anger liberals and attract idiot teenagers. Like the other Stepford wives of the far-Right movement, no one in charge will care all that much what she thinks because “every woman should submit to a godly man” (Charlie Kirk, 2021)

I don’t feel bad for the people who had to see Charlie die, either in person or because of the ubiquity of the video. Sometimes you need to see horrible things in order to know how horrible they are, and maybe this will be one of them. Maybe this video will be this generation’s “The Terror of War,” this generations Emmett Till funeral. Maybe the imagery of a 31-year-old man drenched in his own blood will haunt some of the people who saw it so badly that they relive it in their mind every time they hear about a school shooting and they’ll actually put some effort into doing something about it.

I don’t feel bad for Charlie Kirk. Not because he deserved to die. No one deserves to be murdered at a public speaking event in their early 30s. No one deserves to have the indignity of their death broadcast around the world to such a degree. I’ve never really liked the idea of public executions or lynching of people like Mussolini or Cromwell or Ceaușescu of Gaddafi or Hussein.

I’m not saying that Kirk was on par with them, obviously, though I do think the question of whether the world is a better place without him in it is a gray one. But I don’t think there’s any more value in watching him die than there is if he’d had a stroke in his bed at night or even simply been murdered off camera like the 50,000 other people whose deaths Charlie thought was justified. I didn’t get a sense of catharsis watching the video so much as a sense of “yeah, that happens sometimes.”

And while it’s not entirely clear why Robinson did what he did — “I had enough of his hatred,” he apparently told his roommate — I’m not celebrating Charlie’s death because I don’t like the fact that any random disgruntled young man can buy, borrow, or steal a gun, easily obtain ammo, drive to a school, climb a building, and kill another person in broad daylight. That’s not a world I want to live in.

But Charlie did.