“Violence” was the Very Last Word

(Just a warning to my readers: this post is going to describe some graphic violence.) 

I saw a man shot today.

If you have social media, you couldn’t possibly have missed that video of the shooting of Charlie Kirk. I was scrolling through the news and there it was. It started to play automatically.

There was Kirk, the notorious right-wing influencer who once called Martin Luther King “awful“ and “not a good person.” Charlie Kirk who said “I think it’s worth 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 is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe. ” Charlie Kirk who said “I can’t stand the word empathy actually. I think “empathy” is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage.” 

Kirk was sitting a bit smugly in a chair with a microphone, wearing a white t-shirt, under a banner that said “American Comeback.” I didn’t hear what he was saying until later, because the computer was muted; it turns out that an audience member was asking him about the number of mas shooters in America in the past ten years, relative to the number of transgender mass shooters. Kirk scoffed “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

“Violence” was the last word Charlie Kirk ever said.

A moment later, he was shot in the neck.

I watched him shot in the neck.

The video was going viral, shared thousands of times, and so thousands of people watched a human being getting shot in the neck, under a banner that said “American Comeback.”

Charlie Kirk has two little children, and one day they will know that there’s a famous viral video of his father saying “violence” and getting shot in the neck.

At first, I couldn’t tell what had happened. Something about the way he recoiled when the bullet hit him made his shirt billow in such a way that I thought he was shot in the chest. And then the audience turned and ran, the same kind of panicked stampede I watched in the video of the Philadelphia Independence Day shooting, and every other mass shooting America has caught on film. A crowd all looking one way, and then they turn the other way like a murmuration of starlings.

To be an American is to recognize that panicked murmuration, running from the sound of a gun. To be an American is to wonder if the next mass shooting will be in your town. To be an American is to wonder if, someday, a person you love will be the one recoiling from the bullet, and the one running away will be you.

One day, I suppose, Charlie Kirk’s two little children may see that video of their father getting shot in the neck, and wonder if he was actually shot in the chest. They will see the murmuration of people running away from their father as he slumps in his chair, after he said “violence.”

The shooting was all anyone could talk about, myself included.

Some right-wingers were praising Kirk. Some centrist or liberal people were trying to stammer good things about Kirk. Some people, fewer people than I expected, were snickering cruel things about him. A whole lot of right-wing influencers immediately called for vengeance. One day, Kirk’s children may read the good things that were said, and the jokes that were made, and the calls for vengeance. And I hope someone shows them the empathy that their father didn’t like.

So many millions and millions of Americans have had to survive a father or a mother or a sibling or a child lost to gun violence, and listen to the good and bad things that are said about the person who is gone forever. And all of those people also deserve empathy.

As I write this, it’s midnight on September eleventh, and the shooter is still at large.

Nobody knows the shooter’s motive yet. Obviously, I’ve got a few guesses. The president has come on television and said the shooting happened because the “radical left” called Kirk a Nazi, but there’s no way to know that,  yet.

Moments after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, there was another shooting– this time, a school shooting– in another part of America.

In Jefferson County, Colorado, three teenagers were sent to the hospital in critical condition. One was the shooter, who turned the gun on himself, and is now dead. That’s all that we know right now. The first shooting has sucked all the oxygen out of the discourse, but at least three more families have had their lives changed forever, and at least one more human being is dead. The school, Evergreen High School, is very close to Columbine High School, where America’s epidemic of mass shootings was touched off twenty-five years ago.

Violence was the last word.

In America, violence is always the very last word.