On the Political Nature of All Gun Violence

6 minutes read time.

The news on Wednesday was a chaotic and brutal diptych of American tragedy. In Colorado, a juvenile male opened fire at Evergreen High School, wounding two students before taking his own life. In Utah, the conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a university event, an act the governor immediately labeled a “political assassination.” As the nation reeled, a familiar and hollow chorus of platitudes began: “political violence is never the right answer.” In a pablum world, that would be correct. But we do not live in a pablum world. I am convinced that all gun violence is political violence, a direct result of the political failure to protect citizens from the predictable consequences of unfettered gun access. Yesterday, the nation was forced to confront two horrific, yet profoundly unequal, examples of this truth.

The first and most telling reaction to the day’s events was the emergence of a clear, politically convenient hierarchy of grief. This disparity was not accidental; it was editorial. A quick survey of the nation’s leading media outlets tells the story. Was the horror at Evergreen High School on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post? Was it the lead story on NPR? No. The Colorado papers were largely alone in centering the story of their wounded children, and even some of them placed the Kirk shooting at the top. This demonstrates a systemic devaluation of student lives. They can’t vote, so their lives are expendable, is that it? Is that really the message we want to send to our nation’s youth? The shooting at Evergreen was treated as a tragic but depressingly routine local news story—a story of anonymity, of wounded students whose privacy was protected, of boilerplate horror from local politicians. It was, in short, just another Tuesday in America, except it was a Wednesday.

The death of Charlie Kirk, however, was immediately elevated to a national crisis, an event that had “shocked the nation’s conscience.” He was memorialized as a “conservative titan” and the “singular leader of MAGA’s next generation.” Every living U.S. president issued a statement. The sitting President delivered an address from the Oval Office. The disparity is political. The students in Colorado were a tragedy; Charlie Kirk was a martyr for a cause.

But to simply label what Kirk represents as “conservative” is to miss the point entirely. It is not just a 2nd Amendment-favoring political message. What he championed was a form of pseudo-Christianity, a political religion where being white, male, and Christian(ish) is the only sure way to some very strange style of American salvation. It is a hollow faith, stripped of mercy and grace, that uses the iconography of Christianity to justify a blood-and-soil nationalism. Real Christians, those who believe in the radical love and humility of the Gospels, run from this nonsense as fast as they possibly can. The fact that Kirk was able to draw such large populations of young people is a damning indictment of the complete failure of any established religion to provide them with a reassuring and authentic form of guidance, leaving a spiritual vacuum to be filled by political demagogues.

This toxic ideology was on full display in the chaotic theater of blame that followed his death. The President’s reaction was a masterclass in the authoritarian impulse. After a perfunctory call for unity, he immediately pivoted to vow a “crack down on the ‘radical left,'” promising to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” including unspecified “organizations.” Let us be clear about what this is: a threat. The ultimate loser here is likely to be free speech. The President is not upset that a man was killed; he is upset that his worldview is being challenged. He believes his opinions are perfect and dissent is a form of treason. Now, he is signaling his intent to use the violence that took a supporter’s life as a pretext for curbing the constitutional right to disagree with him.

This strategy of partisan weaponization devolved into an even uglier shouting match on the floor of the House of Representatives. A moment of silence for Kirk was shattered when Democrats, responding to a Republican call for prayer, shouted, “What about the kids in Colorado?” The raw, instinctual id of the MAGA movement was then laid bare when Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a former employee of Kirk’s, turned to her Democratic colleagues and screamed, “You caused this!”

This rush to assign blame, to convert tragedy into partisan ammunition before a single fact about the killer’s motive is known, is now the standard political playbook. But amidst all this blame and performative grief, an uncomfortable truth hangs in the air, a truth spoken by Charlie Kirk himself. In a 2023 podcast, Kirk argued that the deaths of school children, while tragic, were a necessary price to pay, that they were “worth it” in order to “Uphold the right of the 2nd Amendment.”

This is the core of the matter, the central hypocrisy that the entire political right and a complicit center refuse to acknowledge. Charlie Kirk was not a victim of the “radical left,” as his allies immediately claimed; he was a victim of the very political ideology he championed. The same political failure that allows a troubled teen to bring a handgun into a Colorado high school is the one that allowed an assassin to bring a long rifle to a Utah university. The violence that took Kirk’s life is not a separate category from the violence that takes the lives of children; it is a distinction without a difference. The people who tell us that political violence is never the answer are the political descendants of those who urged Franklin D. Roosevelt to stay out of “Europe’s war,” failing to recognize that the threat was already here, and that inaction was a choice with deadly consequences.

The statistics are a grim testament to our political choices. So far this year, 167 children between the ages of 0 and 11 have been killed by guns, and another 350 have been injured. For teens aged 12 to 17, the numbers are 707 killed and 1,994 injured. These children are victims of a political choice to prioritize unfettered gun access over public safety. Charlie Kirk died from the exact same political choice. If they are victims of the 2nd Amendment, then so was he.

The real tragedy of yesterday is not just the two shootings, but our collective, politically enforced inability to see them as two symptoms of the same disease: a political system that has decided, either through active policy or willful neglect, that a certain level of bloodshed is simply the cost of doing business in America.