"THE CHICKENS HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST." First of all, I do not, in any way, shape, form or fashion, take pleasure in nor celebrate the death of this bright young man, nor in any needless death. Those who do so are mentally sick and cruel-hearted. But it must be said: Charlie Kirk (and others of his political ilk) planted the seeds of this horror himself, and reaped the dire, deadly harvest of his own sowing. An implacable warrior for unrestricted, unrestrained gun rights, who was virulently opposed to any form of commonsense regulation of guns, he mocked and trivialized the pain and grief of other families who experienced the unspeakable horror of losing loved ones cut down by senseless gun-death, and insensitively and carelessly diminished, denigrated and devalued the life of gun-death victims, saying that their violent, bloody demise is a price worthy to be paid. He stigmatized the abhorrent proliferation of death by guns as something only perpetrated in and experienced by certain communities and cultures, and even his very last words before entering into eternity “counting or not counting gang violence?” were spoken to ingrain this stereotype in the public discourse he was having with his audience during the last moments and seconds of his fleeting life.
The sad, but profoundly telling, irony of this situation is that HIS OWN death by gun violence was allegedly committed by the EXACT OPPOSITE of the stereotypical killer he has so passionately and exuberantly railed and raged against. Because, we now know that he was cut down in broad, open daylight, not by a Black person, or a Latino, or an illegal alien, or a muslim, or an unjustly released criminal, or a transvestite; no, his cold-blooded, boldfaced murderer is a young, college-level, very accomplished, all-American White man, who was a straight-A student with no criminal background and was raised in a 2-parent, very conservative, professional law-enforcement careered, self-identified Christian family; a family whose social media footprint clearly shows is comprised of strong 2nd Amendment-advocating, multiple gun-owning, Republican, Trump supporters. Lest we forget, Utah is an open-carry State, for which no permit is required of any resident aged 21 and older to carry a firearm, openly or concealed.
It begs the question, which must be asked: does Charlie’s widow and mother of his 2 precious children, and his grief-stricken family, and his circle of loved-ones and political cohorts STILL agree with him, and believe that his untimely death was a righteous and worthy price to pay for the acceleration of continued gun violence in America? Now that it is his cold, lifeless body lying in a casket, do they still think the unregulated, unrestricted proliferation of guns in the United States was worth his life and his blood that we all watched in abject horror as it gushed out from his punctured jugular vein? He certainly believed the price was worth it when it came to other gun victims killed and when it was their families who suffered the searing, excruciating pain of bereavement. He did not know it, but his own words to that effect were a death sentence, and contained the foretelling of his own fate and that of his own family. Unlike in the fanciful, farcical world he wanted to create, there was no “good guy with a gun” to save him on that fated day and to stop the bullet that slew him from being fired into his neck. These are among the many misguided and erroneous principles that he fought for and voraciously promoted till his dying breath.
Not only that, but he also has for a long time regularly and consistently comported and collaborated with nazis and White supremacists, and often embraced and advanced their hateful ideology and venomous, poisonous, rancid rhetoric regarding communities of color and indigenous communities. Thus, he helped to build and create the very political environment that spawned his senseless and tragic murder.
I, like many others, abhor violence and grieve his loss deeply and its dark and dangerous impact upon our fragile nation, and pray empathetically for his widow and fatherless children. But make no mistake, Charlie Kirk was no hero and certainly no martyr, and his own words and actions paved the way for his own demise.
“Be not deceived: God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap.”
GALATIANS 6:7