In my last column, I opined on the Mississippi sales tax holiday on guns and ammunition purchases, held during the last weekend of August. In case you missed it, I wondered why sales-tax breaks on firearm purchases were even necessary for most Mississippians. But, as part of that discussion, I also talked about last month’s Annunciation Catholic Church shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where, tragically, two grade school children lost their lives.
In that column, I observed that, since I write days in advance, there might very well be another school shooting in the U.S. before the one I was working on even went to print. Those words would turn out to be truer than I knew. The day before my column was published, there was indeed another school shooting in Colorado where a high school student lost his life.
Worse, this time around, the Colorado school shooting was drowned out by another shooting on a college campus at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. There, right-wing political firebrand Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a lone gunman before an audience of thousands. The two shootings took place almost within the same hour but, as we now know, Kirk’s assassination has had much broader national implications.
I happened to be in the kitchen preparing a salad when the incident took place. My television was tuned to a cable news station as the broadcast was interrupted by breaking news. I remained in the kitchen as I listened. The news was that Kirk had been shot at UVU during one of his many college campus appearances. At that point, not much more was known.
His name didn’t mean that much to me outside of knowing that he was a conservative media personality who also hosted his own podcast. By the time I was able to sit and watch the story unfold, early news reported only that after he was shot, Kirk was immediately rushed to an area hospital. No more details were provided on his condition. On one network, a doctor who'd seen video of the gunshot to Kirk's neck came on and was able to outline the challenges doctors would face to save his life.
The bullet was fired from a high-powered rifle about 500 feet away. The doctor explained the damage such a gunshot would cause, considering the neck contains veins supplying blood from the heart to the brain, not to mention air passages. After hearing the doctor’s explanation of his injury, I couldn’t help believing that he would not survive the gunshot. Less than an hour later, President Trump himself announced that Charlie Kirk was dead.
By then, the airwaves were filled with news about his life and, of course, his politics. It was then that many of us, me included, got to know more about him. As you might expect, in today’s America, Kirk’s often controversial beliefs divided us into opposing camps—hailed as a hero by those on the right, while the left considered him a social pariah.
That said, I certainly did not celebrate his death, any more than I’d celebrate the death of any fellow human being, especially for a life that ended in such a gruesome and public way. My mind wrestled with his injury as described by the doctor. It reminded me of the school children I discussed two weeks ago who witnessed the aftermath of a mass shooting. Those college students in the audience were faced with the same kind of horror.
Even more disturbing is that video of Kirk’s shooting, in all of its gory detail, can be found on the web. What kind of person wants to see that? Have we become so desensitized to violence that we treat the real thing like a video game or the routine bloodletting we see in Hollywood movies? Another subject altogether—back to the point, though.
Charlie Kirk: Hero or villain? Seems, in today’s America, he can be both at the same time. After learning more about him, I can say that Mr. Kirk is no hero of mine, but I’ll stop short of calling him a villain. He was a fellow American whose beliefs, many of them, were polar opposite of mine. Still, as different as our beliefs were, he had as much right to express them publicly as I do in the pages of this newspaper. The difference is that Kirk had a much larger microphone than the rest of us. And while his words may have sounded like manna from heaven for some, for others, they came off as poisonous, even incendiary.
I don’t like the way Kirk felt and talked about members of my race, our place in society and even the workforce. He once said that whenever he boarded a commercial flight and there was a Black pilot, he hoped the pilot hadn’t gotten the job as a result of one of those diversity, equality and inclusion policies (DEI). His implication denigrates the achievements of Black Americans. He further proved his disdain for members of my race again when he claimed that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people.” I could go on but will stop there.
People have been losing their jobs over saying anything deemed untoward about Charlie Kirk in death. Most famously, late-night TV show host Jimmy Kimmel’s show was placed on indefinite suspension by ABC and the Disney Corp. because of what might have been considered a badly worded, poorly timed comment made in his opening monologue about the then-unknown political persuasion of Kirk’s assassin. As that action works its way through society’s analysis, there are bigger things for us to consider.
I saw one meme on Facebook, an illustration featuring Kirk standing beside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with the caption “killed because of his words.” If that’s the way someone felt, fine. The most precious of American gifts is our freedom of speech and, there’s no doubt, Charlie Kirk exercised that right daily. Whether I agree with him or not, it is chilling to think that his voice was silenced by a single gunshot. His life was taken for “what he preached,” and that’s the only comparison I’ll make between him and Dr. King.
But I guess there is another. Charlie Kirk’s assassination is about more than the death of one man, so was Dr. King's. Political violence is a virus, and the great danger here is that it can spread. It’s up to all of us to keep that from happening. At last Sunday's memorial service Kirk's widow, set the nation's table for us speaking of her husband's alleged killer, "That young man...I forgive him."
Today, we need calmer souls, like Erica Kirk's. And certainly, we need---most of all---courageous leadership. The kind that puts this country's future above politics. And so now, what's our next move, America?
