![Charlie Kirk And The Cost Of US Gun Culture [Op-Ed]](https://powervaultnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/17576065651343.jpg "Charlie Kirk And The Cost Of US Gun Culture [Op-Ed]")
Charlie Kirk, a staunch Christian conservative, as soon as dismissed the slaughter of strangers as a tragic however vital value of freedom. “I feel it’s value it,” he stated, “to have, sadly, some gun deaths each single 12 months in order that we are able to have the Second Modification to guard our different God-given rights.”
These phrases dripped with the smugness of somebody who believed he’d by no means be among the many casualties. For males like Kirk, dying is for the nameless, the expendable, the “statistics.” It’s a chillingly informal calculus. Some individuals should die. Faceless. Anonymous. And conveniently out of sight in order that the parable of American gun liberty can march on untouched.
Now, Charlie Kirk himself has develop into the “price.”
On a September afternoon within the purple state of Utah, a bullet discovered his neck throughout a Turning Level USA occasion. Instantly, the person who shrugged off different individuals’s blood as patriotic inevitability bled out for his personal trigger.
Within the remaining minutes earlier than that shot rang out, he was answering a scholar’s query about transgender shooters. When requested what number of there had been up to now decade, Kirk sneered, “Too many,” to cheers from the gang. He had simply doubled down on the fiction that trans individuals are a singular hazard when statistically, the overwhelming majority of America’s mass shooters are straight white males.
So, the merciless symmetry is that this: although the investigation is ongoing, it’s way more probably that Kirk was shot not by the marginalized group he vilified, however by somebody who appeared like his base, his viewers, his voters. Somebody like him—a straight white man. The very profile liable for the overwhelming bulk of America’s gun carnage.
And if I’m unsuitable, I’ll eat my phrases. However historical past and statistics not often are.
Within the hours after the capturing, you might already see the machine Kirk constructed cranking into movement, sprucing the story, inflating the which means, and turning him right into a victim-saint of gun tradition.
Just some months in the past, a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband have been murdered of their residence by a right-wing Christian posing as a police officer. That killing was handled as a neighborhood tragedy, rapidly absorbed by the information cycle. Distinction that with Kirk, the poster boy of MAGA ideology, and you may already see the distinction. His capturing is being elevated into fantasy, spun into martyrdom, and polished into propaganda.
The headlines already learn like scripture: “Charlie Kirk shot throughout campus occasion.” His title will likely be etched into speeches about God-given rights, as if a bullet baptized him into the pantheon of conservative heroes.
Conservatives rushed to crown him a martyr, a sacrificial lamb of the Second Modification, proof that even their most loyal zealots are underneath siege. Home Speaker Mike Johnson led a second of silence and prayer for Charlie Kirk within the Home of Representatives. So did the New York Yankees earlier than final evening’s sport. Former presidents, senators, and preachers tweeted out prayers. His title was folded into the script of American gun mythology.
And within the flood of response posts, some painted him as a person all the time prepared to “sit down for civil debate,” conveniently forgetting that his rhetoric was by no means civil. Tate Reeves, governor of Mississippi, wrote on X: “This can be a actually darkish day for America. Charlie Kirk led discussions—debating in good religion along with his political opponents. He was the right instance of what civil political engagement ought to appear to be.”
However Kirk’s rhetoric was violent, demeaning, and designed to radicalize.
Tate and others claimed that “the left determined that assassination and violence is their response to debate,” a untimely spin on condition that the shooter hadn’t been caught and nothing was recognized about their politics or motive.
What’s actually revolting isn’t simply that Charlie Kirk is being canonized; it’s who’s doing the canonizing, and what it says about this nation.
The story they’re telling is a lie dressed up as advantage. They repeated the drained, hole refrain, “there’s no place for political violence in America,” as if centuries of lynchings, assassinations, coups, and insurrections weren’t already the bedrock of American politics.
However this isn’t martyrdom. It’s suggestions.
Martyrs die for increased beliefs like justice, reality, and freedom from tyranny. They face the gallows as a result of they refused to betray their conscience, or the firing squad as a result of they stood on the facet of liberation. Charlie Kirk isn’t that. He’s a person who made a fortune off of stoking concern, turning younger individuals into foot troopers of white grievance, and constructing a political model the place violence is an appropriate byproduct of freedom. He didn’t give his life for justice. He didn’t fall for reality. He bought caught within the crossfire of the very tradition he championed.
That is what occurs if you normalize violence as liberty. That is what occurs if you recast faculty shootings as ideological props, like when Kirk’s platforms amplified false, anti-trans conspiracy spins as an alternative of specializing in victims. You dismiss trauma, weaponize identities, and physique counts develop into political fodder. Eventually, that circle of blood closes in on you.
The circle normally closes on the weak first. Black and Brown neighborhoods the place police usually tend to shoot than defend. Girls stalked by abusers armed with simply bought firearms. Youngsters who discover pistols of their dad and mom’ nightstands. Entire clasFsrooms shattered by a single AR-15. America’s gun dying toll isn’t unfold evenly; it’s structured, racialized, and predictable. Charlie Kirk wasn’t nervous about these deaths. He accepted them, justified them, and rationalized them. Till a kind of “acceptable” bullets got here for him.
However don’t anticipate honesty in how his story is instructed. Count on spectacle. Count on speaking heads to insist his capturing proves why extra weapons are vital, not fewer.
And if his supporters are decided to enshrine him, let’s be clear about what they’re sanctifying: the informal acceptance of slaughter. Not braveness, not sacrifice, not justice, however the limitless recycling of our bodies for revenue, politics, and energy.
And right here’s the place the irony sharpens. Charlie Kirk wasn’t only a foot soldier in America’s gun cult. He was a salesman. He toured campuses, conferences, and church buildings, grooming younger conservatives to imagine that blood is the worth of liberty. He taught them to sneer at grieving moms and name their cries for gun reform emotional manipulation. He taught them {that a} nation drowning in bullets was nonetheless the best place on Earth, as a result of something lower than absolute entry to firearms can be tyranny.
Now, the salesperson has develop into the product. His physique is the billboard. His wound is the commercial. Had he survived, he would have stood on stage with a scar and known as it proof of his convictions. However he’s lifeless now, and his supporters will taxidermize his picture into the pantheon of right-wing saints. Both method, the lie will preserve promoting.
That’s the genius and the horror of America’s gun mythology: it could actually flip any corpse into propaganda.
However what if we refused that? What if we stripped the sanctimony away and stated out loud what this actually is? Not braveness. Not sacrifice. Not divine will. Simply one other casualty in a rustic so hooked on firearms that even its most loyal apostles can’t escape the carnage.
As a result of if Charlie Kirk’s story turns into martyrdom, then each baby gunned down in a college was a martyr too. Each accident, each stray bullet ripping via drywall. However we don’t name them martyrs. We name them “statistics.” We inform their households to maneuver on. We bury them in silence. We ship “ideas and prayers.”
That’s the ethical rot right here. Not simply that Kirk is being elevated, however that thousands and thousands of others by no means will likely be. His blood is politicized, their blood is erased. His wound is an emblem; their wounds are collateral harm. He will likely be remembered; they’re all forgotten.
Charlie Kirk is the logical conclusion of the very ideology he preached: a nation the place bullets are background noise, the place lives are expendable, the place freedom is measured in physique luggage. His story doesn’t redeem the gun tradition. It exposes it.
And if we’ve got any collective sanity left, that’s how this second ought to be remembered. Not as a holy sacrifice, however as a warning. A flashing purple signal that claims: That is the America you constructed. That is the America you defend. And for those who preserve worshipping on the altar of the gun, then in the future, your individual prophets will bleed at it too.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and writer of “Spare The Children: Why Whupping Youngsters Received’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Youngsters In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
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