Kirk killing touches a nerve

So a commentator a lot of people cared about, Charlie Kirk, was murdered this week. I abhor violence. I have to admit I did not know who he was.

I don’t watch cable news networks or Fox entertainment.

Years ago a frequent commenter on my social media accused me of parroting Don Lemon. I had to look up who Don Lemon was. No one murdered Don Lemon.

I wrote this on Facebook last night and set off a storm.

“I will write about it in Short Take tomorrow but Trae Crowder, the Liberal Redneck, made a great point about Charlie Kirk's death tonight at Helium in Buffalo.

“Crowder said Kirk's death was ‘The unfortunate but necessary cost of freedom. To employ too much empathy at a time like this would be disrespectful.’

“I guess I'll file that one under ‘you reap what you sow’ or the ‘find out’ portion of FAFO.”

As for shits and giggles, the dark irony of Kirk’s murder was he was answering questions about the proliferation of mass shootings and was hit as he answered.

From what I have read, Kirk was one of those commentators who posited that the 2nd Amendment was so precious, occasional deaths were the cost of our freedom.

I could offer thoughts and prayers to his followers, but shits and giggles seem they might do just as well. It is too bad there wasn’t a good guy with a gun present to take out his assassin.

Far too often the reaction to violence is to call for more violence. The angst expressed on social media on this topic is overwhelming

Colleen Larkin shared this context on what Kirk said about gun violence.

CHARLIE KIRK: “Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my mind.

“The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.

“Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000 –50,000!— 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools.

“We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

“You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it's worth it. 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.

“So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?”