The horrifying assassination of the activist Charlie Kirk reminds us yet again that no one in the United States will be safe until sweeping gun reform is passed. We here in Australia, where gun reform was passed without opposition three decades ago, can only watch in despair at the willingness of Americans to live in a violent society.
It need not be so. Gun reform is a solved problem—Australia is the paramount example, but countries around the world have done similarly. One is reminded of the old headline from satirical newspaper The Onion: No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
Americans, conservative and liberal alike, often invoke American exceptionalism to suggest that policies that work elsewhere will never work in their country. Their country, they think, is special. It is not.
What is special is the refusal to act, and the willingness of the right wing to ensure further death. People that defend the status quo, like Kirk, are responsible for maintaining that status quo.
Kirk liked to imply that gun deaths are the doing of trans- and black people. He was just finished doing exactly that when a sniper shot him through the neck. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member had asked him.
“Too many,” Kirk responded, to applause.
The audience member told him that the total was merely five, and went on: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”1
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk replied, in what would be his final words.
In a sane world, right wing Americans would understand that no one is safe in a society ruled by the gun. Yesterday the country that fully acclimatised itself to the shooting of school children was jolted awake by the shooting of something it values more highly: the influencer. I am not being glib: hours after Kirk died, a school in Denver was shot up. The US President has said nothing. The massacre of praying children last month barely registered. It is a society inured to the death of children.
In the coming days we will find out more about the shooter. My own money is on a deranged white supremacist, or a QAnon-type upset that Kirk, after a phone call with Trump, announced he would stop talking about Epstein. Many on the right are claiming that this is a left wing political assassination—I find it hard to believe anyone on the left wants to give the Trump administration pretext for further grabs at power.
But who can say. What matters for now is this: whoever is responsible, they would not have been able to shoot Kirk if they did not have access to a gun.
Kirk, meanwhile, lived and died in the gun-addicted status quo he defended. He argued that deaths were “worth it” to protect the right to bear arms. Now he is dead, and the remaining democratic pillars of his country, already fragile, could crumble at any moment.
A 2023 report published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) covering 2014 to 2022, found there had been 4,011 mass shootings in the US over that period.
America didn’t just let Kirk die by the gun. America let him write his own punchline. His final argument wasn’t a mic drop, it was a ricochet. He spent years saying gun deaths were worth it for freedom, then he became Exhibit A. That isn’t martyrdom. That’s a nation so hooked on its own mythology it can’t tell the difference between liberty and crossfire. Blessed be the kids we keep sacrificing while pretending it’s just the cost of doing business.
It's not ALL citizens willing to live with gun violence, sir. It's our government comprised of dirtbag, paid shills. It's an imperial policy for global wars and resource theft. It's the capitalist impulse to monitize everything! Education, MSM news, sports, Hollywood, etc. SELL propaganda 24/7. The Wall Street bull and gun rights are sacred to these predators.