Guns and Blame: Kirk shooting
Shortly after midday on Wednesday, a single shot from a bolt-action rifle struck the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in the neck. Just hours later, with shockingly graphic footage of Kirk’s death already swirling around social media, Donald Trump had publicly blamed ‘the radical left’.
Kirk was a hugely divisive figure in American politics, highly influential with American youth: he was just 31-years-old and had 10 million followers across social media platforms. His outspoken views on topics like transgender rights, equal opportunity and, ironically, gun control, made him unpopular with the liberal mainstream. Kirk claimed that ‘in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.‘ Such unfounded, racist claims do nothing to create harmony in America and should have no place in politics, but this makes Kirk’s assassination no less wrong.
Trump’s immediate assertion that the shooting was the work of ‘radical left’ was opportunistic and disingenuous. While there may ultimately prove to be truth in it, little was known about the shooter when Trump spoke from the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, so his words are evidence of the Trump administration’s fomenting of fear and division. America has a long history of political violence. However, there is no pattern to the political views of the men who took aim at Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy, Reagan and Trump.
To attribute a pattern of mental health would also be misleading, given that mental illness is prevalent in societies without such high levels of political violence. One pattern that might emerge is around access to guns, or what the Americans often term ‘the second amendment’; a right central to the American conception of ‘freedom’. There is dark irony in the fact that Kirk was taking a question on gun rights just moments before he was shot and killed, and his views on the topic were unequivocal: ‘I think it’s worth it 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.’ Rational or not, he is now part of that ‘cost’.
We can only imagine the suffering Kirk’s young widow, Erika Kirk, is experiencing. We should not judge too harshly her bullish public statements in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s shooting: she describes her mourning as a ‘battle cry’ and affirms that ‘we [the conservative, Christian right] will never surrender’. The language is overtly militaristic: an assertion of her beliefs and a refusal to be cowed. Free speech must never be cowed by senseless violence. However, political debate must, especially in a country with a terrible history of gun violence, seek unity over division, and this is what has been so troubling in the aftermath of Kirk’s tragic death. Remarkably, President Trump openly rejected ‘unity’ in a media interview on Friday. It would appear he seeks division.
It is too easy to say that Kirk was a ‘victim of his own rhetoric’, but America must again confront two key issues: the tone of political argument, and America’s gun control laws. The Trump administration doesn’t share this view.
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