General Discussion

mnhtnbb

(32,839 posts) Thu Sep 11, 2025, 11:02 AM Sep 11

367

Best summation on the irony of Charlie Kirk's death that I've seen

“Charlie Kirk has long argued that the epidemic of gun violence in America is the regrettable, but acceptable, price of liberty. In his words, the trade-off is a “prudent deal,” a “rational” sacrifice to preserve the Second Amendment and protect what he calls “God-given rights.” (He said these cruel and heartless words at a speaking event in April 2023 — I'm just the messenger.)
When children are slaughtered in their classrooms, when congregants are gunned down in churches, when families are erased at grocery stores, Kirk’s response is not grief but calculus. The deaths are tragic, he says, but worth it. A necessary toll paid at freedom’s gate. “Thought and prayers.”
And so, when he himself was shot at a speaking event in Utah, the hypocrisy was deafening. Here was a man who minimized other people’s agony, suddenly forced to taste the violence he once dismissed. This is what I mean by Second Amendment justice: not that the shooting should be celebrated, not that violence solves anything, but that the logic he defended has folded back on him like a tesseract.
He declared that mass shootings were an unfortunate but tolerable part of liberty. Then he became a victim of the very “tolerable violence” he worked so hard to normalize.
It is not justice in the sense of moral balance or divine retribution. It is justice in the way a mirror delivers justice: cold, impartial reflection. The gun culture he championed did not exempt him. The bullets he waved away in theory found their way into practice. He is not immune. None of us are.
The asymmetry here is staggering. When Nashville lost six lives, when Buffalo buried grandmothers and fathers, when children in Uvalde were executed one after another, Kirk’s sympathy was withheld. He hardened his rhetoric. He doubled down. His “deal” demanded that others bear the cost, while he collected the political dividends of defiance. They are some sweet economic dividends, I tell you. Charlie Kirk gets paid for his support of the Conservative agenda.
But compassion is a muscle. Fail to exercise it for others, and you cannot expect it to be exercised for you. If he offered no tears for the slain, why should the public be compelled to offer them for him?
This is not schadenfreude. It is a reckoning. It is the exposure of a brutal dissonance at the core of American politics: leaders who protect the idea of rights while sacrificing the reality of lives. Leaders who worship an amendment more than they grieve for the children whose bodies become its sacrament. Leaders who declare that freedom requires blood, and then recoil when their own blood is drawn.
Let me be clear: the shooting of Charlie Kirk was a crime. It was not noble resistance. It was not an answer. Political violence corrodes democracy; it breeds escalation, not resolution. But understanding the irony is not the same as endorsing the act. Recognizing the karmic symmetry does not mean cheering it. What it means is this: when cruelty is normalized, when violence is rationalized, when deaths are rendered acceptable by ideology, eventually the logic boomerangs.
That is the lesson here, the harsh and unsentimental truth. You cannot unleash a culture of violence, bless it as liberty, and then feign shock when it arrives at your own doorstep. The Second Amendment, as interpreted by Kirk and his allies, does not discriminate. It devours indiscriminately.
That is the justice of it. Not divine, not poetic — merely inevitable.”
- Thaddeus Howze