Someone is shot in the US every four minutes. Someone is shot dead every 11.
Still, Charlie Kirk’s killing is a horror. No doubt about it.
The right‑wing activist and ally of Donald Trump was shot in the neck and killed yesterday evening while speaking at a university in Utah.
Kirk was a vocal conservative, unafraid of voicing controversial opinions.
He minimised Russia’s unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine to a ‘border dispute’, dismissed white privilege as a ‘racist idea’, called abortion murder without rape exceptions, spread Covid‑19 disinformation, and pushed false election‑fraud claims – and that’s not even the half of it.
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I vehemently disagreed with his politics, but I still mourn his death.
It should be a moment for the President to lower temperatures after a decade of turning up the heat to full blast.
Instead, in his Oval Office video, Trump said the ‘violent left’ had labelled Kirk a ‘Nazi’, implying that was behind the killing.
He added: ‘It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonising those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.’
It may look like unity on the surface – there was finger‑pointing underneath.
Notably, he made no mention of the Democrats killed and targeted this year, in attacks against the Minnesota lawmakers. If you are serious about condemning violence, you name all of it. You do not choose which victims count.
On that occasion, Trump initially condemned the violence, but he did not liaise with Minnesota governor Tim Walz or even call him after the shooting, saying it was a ‘waste of time’ because Walz was ‘whacked out’.
Then, just as now, Trump – himself the victim of an assassination attempt – appears content to fan the flames of division and refuses to temper his own violent rhetoric.
If Trump wants the media to stop ‘demonising those with whom you disagree day after day’ – if he really wants to stop political assassinations, like Kirk’s appears to be – then he needs to look at himself first.
He has hardly been one to calm tensions.
He told America’s ultra-right Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’ on a presidential debate stage and bragged that he could ‘shoot somebody’ and ‘wouldn’t lose any voters’.
He urged crowds to ‘knock the crap out of’ protesters, offering to cover legal fees, and on January 6, 2021, told his followers to ‘fight like hell’.
These are not slips – they are a politics that treats menace as a message. When leaders normalise apocalyptic talk of traitors, invaders and enemies within, someone, somewhere, will hear it literally.
Trump’s response to Kirk’s killing matters because moments like this test the difference between leadership and licence.
Leadership names every victim, cools the temperature and refuses to launder grudges through a eulogy. Licence wraps itself in solemnity while keeping the old enemies list close to hand.
The ecosystem around Trump turned the Paul Pelosi hammer attack into a punchline and fuelled conspiracy theories long after the facts were clear, including a baseless child‑trafficking hoax that sent an armed man on the hunt for Hillary Clinton, accused of ritually murdering babies in the basement of a Washington pizzeria that didn’t have a basement… not exactly cooling the room.
If he truly wants fewer threats tomorrow, he could start by stopping feeding his base today.
One sentence from a conversation with my American sister‑in‑law many months ago still chills me: ‘The moment I realised nothing would ever change here, was the morning after Sandy Hook. If gunning down a classroom full of children doesn’t change anything, what will?’
Nothing can lessen the horror of Kirk’s killing. There is no excuse, full stop.
But it is past time to ask why those with the power to change everything, like Trump, do not take any meaningful steps – changes in law, gun restrictions, background checks at the very least – in the wake of thousands of children killed by the very gun laws they preserve, protect and promote.
Kirk’s death is a brutal reminder that America has a rhetoric problem on top of a political‑violence crisis on top of a gun‑violence epidemic.
The latter is a deep-rooted illness, and as long as the President prioritises division over unity, nothing will get better.
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