Last week, about the time I was welcoming a latecomer to our regular Wednesday afternoon meeting, the news came down that Charlie Kirk, who had been shot earlier that day, had died.
While no one in the group was a big fan of the man, we were still saddened that he had died, leaving his wife with two young children.
I knew, though, that some would celebrate his death (which should be beneath any decent person), and that it wouldn’t be long till someone blamed someone (anybody but the perpetrator) who had absolutely nothing to do with it.
It wasn’t long before one of the resident trolls posted under my column last week, “Might rhetoric like this from Brenda Looper have had anything to do with the killing of conservative icon Charlie Kirk?”
Gosh, I had no idea that imploring people to not “act ugly,” pointing out that life isn’t all puppies and rainbows if you’re not a straight white Christian man, and noting that we have to get back to doing the right thing just because it’s the right thing, was fiery rhetoric. All that effort was wasted, I guess, on rewrites to be more measured and thoughtful.
Then again, the tactic now is to blame someone else, and who better to blame than someone who points out that rhetoric that pits us against each other is a huge part of the problem we have in this country?
We don’t examine things in full anymore, but curate with our biases. That’s one of the reasons such wildly divergent images of Kirk have emerged. What we saw from one side was a Godly Christian man just doing the best for his family and challenging opponents with respect and truth while also “owning the libs,” while the other side saw the horrible things he had said and done on his social media accounts, in interviews, on podcasts and anywhere else he could make his opinions known.
The thing is, whether angel or devil, no one deserves to die like that, and if politics hadn’t so infected normal life in the United States, more people could see that. They’d also see that calling out hate is not hate, but a call to examine ourselves and how we live our lives.
While some are casting blame far too soon (we don’t know the motive yet behind the murder) and inflaming passions that are already too high, some of us out here just want cooler heads to prevail. We want people to consider facts before opinion.
One of those facts: The person who shot Kirk is to blame, period.
Another fact: The “radicals” on either side are far outweighed by those in the center left, center and center right. Painting opposition in broad strokes does nothing but confuse the situation, as conservatives, liberals, libertarians, independents and others come in all flavors, and they can hold seemingly diametrically opposed opinions on an issue at the same time because life is but shades of gray. Demonizing all liberals because of the shooting of Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice in 2017, or all conservatives because of the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords and the deaths of six others at a town hall in 2011, does no one any good.
Well, except for those who feed such characterizations, and those who benefit from the distraction from real issues, especially in situations where the facts aren’t available all at once.
The same day Kirk was killed, a Colorado teen opened fire on school grounds, injuring two students before he killed himself. While we need to have a come-to-Jesus on political violence, we need that as well on the subject of guns, especially when they outnumber residents in the United States and are in the hands of less than 50 percent of that population.
I grew up around guns, and I took hunter-safety classes in 4-H. I’m not anti-gun by any stretch of the imagination, but good aim and a bad temper don’t mix well (nor does depression), so I don’t own a gun. Not everyone is that self-aware, unfortunately, and not everyone should have easy access to firearms.
We’re always told after a shooting that it’s too soon to talk about regulating guns, then that regulations don’t work because the bad guys don’t care about rules. Nothing ever changes.
Maybe at some point we’ll actually try something, like red-flag laws, or requiring insurance and registration (ya know, like with cars). But I won’t hold my breath, even though no less a conservative icon than the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made clear multiple times that the Second Amendment is not unlimited.
Yeah, what did that guy know?
In the meantime, I know that the next shooting (there’s always another one) will provoke outrage, finger-pointing, and ultimately, no changes to the status quo, as will the one after that, the one after that, and so on.
And the people who point out inequities and other ills in a measured manner with facts, and ask that we do the right thing, will continue to be blamed for hateful rhetoric by those who value discord over any show of unity. Because that’s the world we live in now.
And apparently, advocating that we listen to our better angels is just evil.
Assistant Editor Brenda Looper is editor of the Voices page. Email her at [email protected]. Read her blog at blooper0223.com.
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