Charlie Kirk was assassinated Wednesday at Utah Valley University. A sniper took his life in front of thousands of people. It’s an undeniably horrible thing: a man gunned down for his words, a family shattered, children left without their father.
I’ll admit: my first reaction was crude—play stupid games, win stupid prizes. That thought came quickly, but it didn’t sit long. Because while I stand in opposition to nearly everything Kirk believed and promoted, I don’t believe anyone deserves to be killed for their speech. The absurdity here isn’t in his death alone—it’s in the fact that America continues to treat guns as sacred while pretending to mourn the chaos they inevitably create.
Kirk and I lived on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. He dismissed genocide in Gaza, he thought the Civil Rights Act unnecessary — I believe both are essential recognitions of our shared humanity. He argued that a daughter raped by her father should be forced to carry the pregnancy; I can’t imagine anything more cruel. And through it all, he defended the Second Amendment as untouchable, saying mass shootings were a price worth paying to keep America armed.
My own life has been shaped by the opposite conviction. I refused military testing in high school as a conscientious objector. I began donating to Amnesty International and speaking against the death penalty before I was twenty. For decades I have spoken, written, and worked for gun control, for valuing life over firepower.
So no, I don’t celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death. I don’t believe violence against talking heads accomplishes anything. I feel for his wife and children, because grief like that is its own form of violence—slow, invisible, corrosive. But I will not mourn his cause.
What I cannot ignore is the irony: a man who glorified the proliferation of weapons, who said dead children were an acceptable cost of liberty, has now been consumed by the very violence he defended. Yet irony is not justice. Irony doesn’t heal. Irony doesn’t change systems.
Because if this assassination teaches us anything, it’s not just that guns never stay pointed where you think they will—it’s that guns never silence what they’re aimed at. A bullet can kill a man, but it cannot kill an idea. In fact, it often does the opposite: it feeds it, martyrizes it, hardens it. That is the absurdity at the heart of America’s obsession with firearms: we keep mistaking violence for resolution, when in truth it only amplifies the very noise we wish to quiet.
So I will not celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death. I will not mourn his ideology either. Instead, I will continue the long, slow, stubborn work of pushing for a world where we stop believing bullets can settle arguments. Because they never can. A bullet only buries a body, never a belief.