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GELFAND’S WORLD - The death of Charlie Kirk is one of the strangest incidents in the recent history of political assassination. It breaks all the tendencies that we have come to expect, while failing to match the standard stereotypes of either the right or the left.
To begin with, I wonder how many of us had ever heard of Charlie Kirk before we were suddenly confronted with the fact of his murder? I include myself in this number because no, I wasn’t knowledgeable about his existence, much less the core of his political thought.
More strangely still, Kirk’s death by gunfire could be, in a sick and twisted sense, a vindication of one of his own pronouncements. Interestingly, Kirk’s pronouncement – the part from a longer talk and the one that is being repeated by liberal commenters, goes like this:
“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.”
Curiously, this is at least a partial answer to a question I have been asking in this column in response to mass shooting events. “How many deaths will you accept,” I ask, “in order for this country to avoid passing stronger gun control?”
I was not aware of anyone answering my question, but Charlie Kirk actually did. He conceded that people will get killed every year due to the way we handle gun ownership. He didn’t put an upper limit on the number of dead bodies, but he allowed for at least some deaths.
And he said that it was worth it.
It’s true that my question was a bit tendentious. But if we are to accept shooting deaths as a good thing, in that it helps to guarantee Second Amendment rights, then surely one such death is within the acceptable level, isn’t it? I tend to doubt that the death of Charlie Kirk would be, by his own analysis, an unfortunate but acceptable sacrifice to the Second Amendment. The fact that a young man could own a rifle capable of assassinating a person at a distance of 200 yards is, in Kirk’s view, defensible, but how could he consider his own death to be some sort of vindication of the viewpoint quoted above? The ironies and paradoxes abound.
One other point, itself ironic and paradoxical: The rifle that was used in the assassination was not the kind that would be included in any new ban on assault weapons. If current information is correct, the rifle was a garden variety bolt action, the kind that you might buy to hunt deer. (I’ll leave it to the hunters and gun collectors to figure out what the particular caliber would be used for, but let’s concede that this rifle was not the kind that would be effective in some mass shooting event such as happened in Las Vegas and would not fall under any new assault weapons ban.)
It turns out that Kirk was not trying to be trivial in his answer, because his actual answer goes on to consider ways that gunshot deaths could be reduced while still defending Second Amendment rights. His answer is to station armed guards at schools and other places in the same way that we have guards at banks. I suspect that this viewpoint is going to be replaced in future decades by a more controlled approach, but you can read what he actually said in the more complete Snopes account.
Another observation on the killing – in this case not really surprising – is how the opposing political sides responded.
People such as Stephen Colbert and Gavin Newsom spoke out against political murder and offered their sympathy to the surviving spouse and children. The right wing did include some (such as Speaker Mike Johnson) who included such thoughts, but also included a whole lot of people who treated the assassination as another bit of evidence for left wing treachery. Numerous well known right wing leaders including Donald Trump blamed the killing on some sort of left wing extremist propaganda campaign.
This is a remarkably hypocritical argument, considering how right wingers on anonymous forums so often like to threaten liberals with some kind of right vs. left civil war. They like to point out that they have the guns, and that therefore they will win. The right wing in this country has assassinated abortion doctors and state legislators and attempted to kill Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and we haven’t seen much in the way of protest coming from the right wing apologists about such actions.
Speaking of mass shootings, it is evident how little the gun lobby and its political allies are concerned by your average, everyday mass killing. You could tell by the way they have reacted to the Kirk killing compared to, say, the Minnesota church attack or Sandyhook or any of dozens of others. I’m not saying that the gun lobby enjoys the idea of mass shootings, but their behavior suggests that they find them more of an embarrassment – a political concern, actually – than the kind of human tragedy that inspires real tears. We didn’t see AirForce 2 flying to Minnesota to transport a coffin. And by the way, there was another shooting – this one more of a mass shooting – the very same day. We didn’t hear much about that one from Mike Johnson or the president.
And what of Charlie Kirk the conservative debater and opinion leader? By now, the liberal commenters have exposed the Kirk ideology for the racist, misogynist basket of right wing ideology that it was. I don’t need to summarize that part, because it has been written up extensively in lots of other sites.
But there is one other point that requires consideration. Kirk spoke of the Second Amendment as a mechanism that allowed the American people to defend all the other rights. Surely the right to freedom of speech is included in that list, yet a large number of right wingers in this country are trying to punish other Americans who spoke or wrote their personal thoughts following the Kirk killing. You can read about that movement in this CNN piece.
Charlie Kirk invited people to debate him in public. He was famous for posting his invitation, “Prove me wrong.” This is not the action of somebody who was trying to suppress speech. It strikes me as a bit of hubris on his part, and represents a weird sort of logic. After all, if what you are expressing is mainly opinion, there is no way to prove you wrong, in the same way that you yourself cannot prove that your opinions are correct. They are just opinions.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
