Charlie Kirk, a staunch Christian conservative, as soon as dismissed the slaughter of strangers as a tragic however obligatory worth of freedom. “I feel it’s value it,” he stated, “to have, sadly, some gun deaths each single 12 months in order that we will have the Second Modification to guard our different God-given rights.”
These phrases dripped with the smugness of somebody who believed he’d by no means be among the many casualties. For males like Kirk, dying is for the nameless, the expendable, the “statistics.” It’s a chillingly informal calculus. Some folks should die. Faceless. Anonymous. And conveniently out of sight in order that the parable of American gun liberty can march on untouched.
Now, Charlie Kirk himself has grow to be the “value.”
On a September afternoon within the crimson state of Utah, a bullet discovered his neck throughout a Turning Level USA occasion. All of the sudden, the person who shrugged off different folks’s blood as patriotic inevitability bled out for his personal trigger.
Within the closing minutes earlier than that shot rang out, he was answering a pupil’s query about transgender shooters. When requested what number of there had been prior to now decade, Kirk sneered, “Too many,” to cheers from the gang. He had simply doubled down on the fiction that trans individuals are a singular hazard when statistically, the overwhelming majority of America’s mass shooters are straight white males.
So, the merciless symmetry is that this: although the investigation is ongoing, it’s much more possible that Kirk was shot not by the marginalized neighborhood he vilified, however by somebody who regarded like his base, his viewers, his voters. Somebody like him—a straight white man. The very profile liable for the overwhelming bulk of America’s gun carnage.
And if I’m fallacious, I’ll eat my phrases. However historical past and statistics hardly ever are.
Within the hours after the capturing, you might already see the machine Kirk constructed cranking into movement, sharpening the story, inflating the which means, and turning him right into a victim-saint of gun tradition.
Only a few months in the past, a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband had been murdered of their residence by a right-wing Christian posing as a police officer. That killing was handled as a neighborhood tragedy, shortly absorbed by the information cycle. Distinction that with Kirk, the poster boy of MAGA ideology, and you’ll already see the distinction. His capturing is being elevated into delusion, spun into martyrdom, and polished into propaganda.
The headlines already learn like scripture: “Charlie Kirk shot throughout campus occasion.” His identify shall be etched into speeches about God-given rights, as if a bullet baptized him into the pantheon of conservative heroes.
Conservatives rushed to crown him a martyr, a sacrificial lamb of the Second Modification, proof that even their most loyal zealots are beneath siege. Home Speaker Mike Johnson led a second of silence and prayer for Charlie Kirk within the Home of Representatives. So did the New York Yankees earlier than final evening’s recreation. Former presidents, senators, and preachers tweeted out prayers. His identify was folded into the script of American gun mythology.
And within the flood of response posts, some painted him as a person at all times keen to “sit down for civil debate,” conveniently forgetting that his rhetoric was by no means civil. Tate Reeves, governor of Mississippi, wrote on X: “This can be a actually darkish day for America. Charlie Kirk led discussions—debating in good religion along with his political opponents. He was the right instance of what civil political engagement ought to seem like.”
However Kirk’s rhetoric was violent, demeaning, and designed to radicalize.
Tate and others claimed that “the left determined that assassination and violence is their response to debate,” a untimely spin on condition that the shooter hadn’t been caught and nothing was identified about their politics or motive.
What’s actually revolting isn’t simply that Charlie Kirk is being canonized; it’s who’s doing the canonizing, and what it says about this nation.
The story they’re telling is a lie dressed up as advantage. They repeated the drained, hole refrain, “there’s no place for political violence in America,” as if centuries of lynchings, assassinations, coups, and insurrections weren’t already the bedrock of American politics.
However this isn’t martyrdom. It’s suggestions.
Martyrs die for increased beliefs like justice, fact, and freedom from tyranny. They face the gallows as a result of they refused to betray their conscience, or the firing squad as a result of they stood on the facet of liberation. Charlie Kirk will not be that. He’s a person who made a fortune off of stoking concern, turning younger folks into foot troopers of white grievance, and constructing a political model the place violence is an appropriate byproduct of freedom. He didn’t give his life for justice. He didn’t fall for fact. He obtained caught within the crossfire of the very tradition he championed.
That is what occurs once you normalize violence as liberty. That is what occurs once you recast faculty shootings as ideological props, like when Kirk’s platforms amplified false, anti-trans conspiracy spins as a substitute of specializing in victims. You dismiss trauma, weaponize identities, and physique counts grow to be political fodder. Ultimately, that circle of blood closes in on you.
The circle normally closes on the susceptible first. Black and Brown neighborhoods the place police usually tend to shoot than shield. Ladies stalked by abusers armed with simply bought firearms. Kids who discover pistols of their dad and mom’ nightstands. Entire clasFsrooms shattered by a single AR-15. America’s gun dying toll will not be unfold evenly; it’s structured, racialized, and predictable. Charlie Kirk wasn’t fearful about these deaths. He accepted them, justified them, and rationalized them. Till a type of “acceptable” bullets got here for him.
However don’t anticipate honesty in how his story is instructed. Anticipate spectacle. Anticipate speaking heads to insist his capturing proves why extra weapons are obligatory, not fewer.
And if his supporters are decided to enshrine him, let’s be clear about what they’re sanctifying: the informal acceptance of slaughter. Not braveness, not sacrifice, not justice, however the countless recycling of our bodies for revenue, politics, and energy.
And right here’s the place the irony sharpens. Charlie Kirk wasn’t only a foot soldier in America’s gun cult. He was a salesman. He toured campuses, conferences, and church buildings, grooming younger conservatives to imagine that blood is the worth of liberty. He taught them to sneer at grieving moms and name their cries for gun reform emotional manipulation. He taught them {that a} nation drowning in bullets was nonetheless the best place on Earth, as a result of something lower than absolute entry to firearms can be tyranny.
Now, the salesperson has grow to be the product. His physique is the billboard. His wound is the commercial. Had he survived, he would have stood on stage with a scar and referred to as it proof of his convictions. However he’s useless now, and his supporters will taxidermize his picture into the pantheon of right-wing saints. Both means, the lie will hold promoting.
That’s the genius and the horror of America’s gun mythology: it may flip any corpse into propaganda.
However what if we refused that? What if we stripped the sanctimony away and stated out loud what this actually is? Not braveness. Not sacrifice. Not divine will. Simply one other casualty in a rustic so hooked on firearms that even its most loyal apostles can’t escape the carnage.
As a result of if Charlie Kirk’s story turns into martyrdom, then each baby gunned down in a college was a martyr too. Each accident, each stray bullet ripping by drywall. However we don’t name them martyrs. We name them “statistics.” We inform their households to maneuver on. We bury them in silence. We ship “ideas and prayers.”
That’s the ethical rot right here. Not simply that Kirk is being elevated, however that thousands and thousands of others by no means shall be. His blood is politicized, their blood is erased. His wound is an emblem; their wounds are collateral injury. He shall be remembered; they’re all forgotten.
Charlie Kirk is the logical conclusion of the very ideology he preached: a nation the place bullets are background noise, the place lives are expendable, the place freedom is measured in physique baggage. His story doesn’t redeem the gun tradition. It exposes it.
And if we have now any collective sanity left, that’s how this second must be remembered. Not as a holy sacrifice, however as a warning. A flashing crimson signal that claims: That is the America you constructed. That is the America you defend. And when you hold worshipping on the altar of the gun, then sooner or later, your personal prophets will bleed at it too.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and writer of “Spare The Children: Why Whupping Kids Received’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Kids In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
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