I’ve realized I’ve spent the past decade hate-watching Charlie Kirk. Like a lot of young people who grew up in a culture of youth political activism and “debate culture” that was dominated by Kirk, his ilk and imitators, popular videos of Kirk were omnipresent, smug, shallow, designed more to clip to humiliate for an audience far more often than to persuade. I do not think Charlie Kirk “practiced politics the right way,” but for the past decade, you’d be hard-pressed to go a week engaging with politics without listening to Kirk or his rhetoric. He was someone whose politics I found often repugnant for as long as I knew of him.

And yet, going online to find that Kirk had been shot to death while speaking on Utah Valley University’s (UVU) campus at the age of 31 on Sept. 10 felt very surreal. To see such a domineering force in American conservative politics vanish in an instant has left me unsettled, and so has the reaction to his murder.

He was killed mid-debate at the beginning of Kirk’s “Prove Me Wrong” segment, which was part of the first campus stop on Turning Point USA’s American Comeback Tour. Immediately before his death, Kirk was asked how many mass shooters there had been in America over the past decade. He replied: “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Seconds later, a bullet tore through his neck.

Kirk had spent his political career justifying America’s deadly gun culture, and he died while defending it. This was the same man who once said, “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’s a prudent deal. It is rational.”

This ironic fact does not justify his assassination in my mind, but it makes it  unsurprising to see that his death was immediately met with ridicule, memes and celebration from people who viewed Kirk as just a political opponent. I can’t tell you how to feel or react, and I won’t. I personally believe, though, that at the end of the day, Charlie Kirk at UVU and the two victims at Annunciation Catholic School did not deserve to die. No one on Earth, no matter who they are, deserves to die at 31 while their wife and kids watch on the same screens as us, and no one deserves to get shot or bombed in front of their classmates. Every life is sacred; if you disagree, whatever, I will only ask you to look inward as to why.

Unlike Kirk, I think gun control is obviously the answer to gun violence, but I’m cynical. If hundreds of classrooms of dead children won’t, if several presidents and politicians shot dead or otherwise won’t, I know these deaths won’t move the needle. America has more deaths from gun violence than any other developed country, but our conditioning to carnage is not limited to our guns at home. For decades, the powers that be and the American government have justified their violence abroad, from drone strikes in Yemen and Syria, to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to our financial support for Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. When our leaders, media and politicians all insist for decades that some lives are expendable or innately evil, or barbarous or nothing more than “human shields,” that learned apathy directly primes us to relinquish our humanity and accept violence against those we’ve independently deemed “evil” at home.

And Kirk himself trafficked in that logic. He called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and denounced the Civil Rights Act as a “huge mistake.” Kirk said that Islam “is not compatible with Western civilization,” he called George Floyd a “scumbag,” he declared abortion “worse than the holocaust” and said even a 10-year-old raped child should be forced to give birth. He even mocked the very concept of empathy itself as “a made-up New Age term.” Even if I disagree with this kind of reaction, it should not surprise us that many Americans were heartless when he was killed, because he spent so much of his career arguing against that “made-up” empathy for so many, in a country so desensitized to violence and increasingly extreme political rhetoric.

This assassination does not erase what Kirk did to our discourse, nor does it reduce him to just another online talking head, as many in the online peanut gallery have reduced him to. Kirk was not merely a podcaster with a large following; he was one of President Donald Trump’s most influential allies. After co-founding Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012, Kirk built it into the premier conservative youth organization, spreading across nearly 800 colleges in the U.S. Trump himself credited Kirk and TPUSA for helping him win the 2024 election by mobilizing young conservatives. Vice President JD Vance admitted, following his death, that Kirk had helped staff much of the second Trump administration. Kirk was not an afterthought in American politics at all; among younger Republicans today, he was an architect of conservatism’s current shape. TPUSA and Kirk’s politics will outlive him, likely galvanized by his martyrdom. His murder will be weaponized, framed as proof that conservatives are under imminent deadly attack wholesale, which will fuel more division and suspicion. His death does not wash away any damage he’s caused, but it doesn’t erase his humanity. Kirk’s assassination should still be condemned, and if we start deciding that people are expendable, we embrace a further rejection of democracy and a worldview where this kind of violence is deemed as the preferable tool to prove that your political opposition is wrong.

I don’t think I, or anyone else, is insane for not wanting to live in a country that promotes assassination attempts, diminishes school shootings and sends bombs to kill people en masse. You are not insane for not wanting to live in the only country in the developed world that has people use, have unrestricted access to and glorifies the grotesque use of violence to settle political disputes and kill children. Kirk’s death is yet another reminder of how deeply violence defines American life, and how desperately that needs to change, even if there’s little hope that it will.

Andrew McDonald, FCRH ’26, is a history and political science major from Sacramento, California.