Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed yesterday, said of gun deaths on April 5, 2023, “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.” I am not sure how his family, including two young children, and his friends are feeling today, whether they still think it’s worth having “some gun deaths every single year” in order to protect the right of people to own guns, but that’s neither here nor there. Kirk lived and died, and will be now be forever defined, by his love of guns. If I have little or nothing positive to say about a man who peddled fear and loathing through his far right Turning Point USA organisation, my thoughts are with his family and his friends.
The reaction to Kirk’s killing is as unhinged as one might expect, with Donald Trump declaring: “Violence and murder are the tragic consequences of demonising those you disagree with … For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.” Straight away, Trump hints at a murder carried about by “the radical left”, despite not knowing who carried out the murder or her/his political leanings. Well, I am far from being on the “radical left“, but I have no hesitation in describing Kirk as having been on the far right of politics given his Christian nationalist, racist, anti-semitic, sexist, pro gun, anti LGBT, anti-abortion views, a man who lied about Trump having been cheated out of the 2020 presidential election and condoned the insurrectionists who tried to overturn it, an anti-vaxxer, a man who described the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “a border dispute“. Violence and murder, Donald, are the tragic consequences of the words and actions of Charlie Kirk.
Politicians worldwide are piling in after Trump’s words, making as yet unknowable claims about the motivations behind the murder. Who else but chief liar Boris Johnson would post this on Elon Musk’s fascist X?
This is classic Johnson. Gaslighting on an industrial scale. He has no more idea who killed Kirk and why than the man on the Clapham omnibus, or you and me. It’s entirely made up nonsense, a wild assumption, a guess, a cynical attempt to manipulate what is for Kirk’s family and friends a tragedy. If people don’t know by now what Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is really about then I’m afraid they never will.
But Johnson is just one example of the cynical responses to Kirk’s killing. Certainly no-one on the right of politics is saying, “Well, let’s find out who was responsible and take it from there.” The “thoughts and prayers” (not sure what use prayers are after the event, but still) of the populist right are always stained with a desire to make cheap political capital about what is for Kirk’s family a terrible tragedy.
Kirk was an awful human being who said and did awful things to and about people whose lives he knew nothing about. His raison d’etre was hate and division and there is no escaping that. But the man who believed it was worth having “some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights” happened to be the latest victim of gun crime.
So far in 2025, there have been 309 mass shootings in the USA, with 302 deaths and 1,354 injured. Every single one of those deaths is as important as that of Kirk, but because of his fame as an influencer, political activist, author, and media personality his passing has gained far more publicity than anyone else’s.
I’d like to think that Kirk’s death might somehow provoke a rational debate about how words matter and how debate is being poisoned by the shrill voices of those on the extremes of politics, but I fear that suggests a little naivety on my part. The likes of Donald Trump and, inevitably, Boris Johnson see it as an opportunity to foment yet more anger and despair, to help them divide and rule, the classic tactics of despots the world over.
Things aren’t going to get better: they’re going to get worse. The shooter, whoever she or he is, hasn’t killed Kirk’s ideas. Only debate and argument can do that. Others will step into Kirk’s shoes to continue to spread the poison across America and across the rest of the world. We, the people, can do much better than this, but not if people keep voting for it and Charlie Kirk did more than most to help propel Donald Trump back into the White House. So often in life, you reap what you sow and that is what happened to Kirk.
