A little over a year after a shot was fired at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in an assassination attempt on now-President Donald Trump, another shot was fired on the other side of the country.
Charlie Kirk, a political activist and conservative media host, was fatally shot Wednesday during a debate at Utah Valley University.
The debate was part of Kirk’s “American Comeback Tour,” hosted by Turning Point USA – the organization he founded at 18 – in which he set up rallies at college campuses across the nation and engaged in debates over controversial questions with students.
His death marks yet another name on the growing list of victims of political violence in the U.S. in the last few years, a symbol of the turmoil the nation has faced as a result of clashing social and political views.
In the last year alone, according to the New York Times, there have been “two attempts to assassinate Donald J. Trump … ; a Passover firebombing at the residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania; middle-of-the-night shootings of Democratic state lawmakers in Minnesota; and a man … who killed a police officer in a shootout at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta.”
These events sent shockwaves across the nation, igniting people’s desire for change. But then, they fizzled out. Either the grief simply faded away and people went back to their normal lives, or another tragedy took its place and people were forced to move on to grieve for the newest victims.
And so now, we stand at a turning point: we can use this tragedy as a push to end the needless violence we’ve grown so accustomed to, or we can mourn for a week and then forget, just like we’ve done so many times before.
I think we owe it, both to Kirk and the other victims, to put an end to this violence. Our problems are far from being solved, and a compromise between parties sometimes feels like a million miles away, but violence has never been solved with more violence.
Regardless of political affiliation or personal beliefs, this tragedy has to be seen for what it is: the end of a human life.
It can be easy to turn Kirk’s death, or the death of any other prominent figure, into nothing more than a statement used to prove one ideology or another. It’s happened far too many times in the past, with far too many people reduced to symbols.
It’s our job to prevent that; with Kirk, and all the other victims in recent memory, and all the victims that may still come. In a time of turmoil, we have to choose to step back and remember people as people, not just as representatives of something we stand for or against.
We will never reach a complete agreement between all the people on this planet on what is right or wrong, but it is my deepest hope that we can all see that a repeat of this incident should never happen again. The violence has to stop now.