Charlie Kirk and the burst dam of political violence In America

Legacy. This is a watchword in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10 2025. Kirk was killed by a lone shooter at a speaker event at Utah Valley University (UVU). He was a highly prominent conservative commentator who had amassed a high level of support and credit from both President Donald Trump and the wider MAGA movement in the United States, campaigning for Trump in the 2024 election.

The killing came almost a year after Trump, as the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, evaded the second of two assassination attempts. The first was at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, with the second at a golf course he owned in Palm Beach, Florida. Kirk’s death has ignited a fire from the flames of problematic political violence in the United States. The polarisation in the country has become palpable, almost toxic, in the wake of his murder.

However, anyone who followed Kirk closely enough knew how controversial he was as a public figure. It cannot be ignored that Kirk’s more outspoken critiques stoked some of these tensions. There were voices on the left that attributed Kirk’s death itself to a direct cost of his rhetoric.

“I think it’s worth it 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.” This quote, taken from a speech made by Kirk in April 2023, has been lauded by certain voices as evidence that Kirk’s own scepticism of gun control led to a normalisation of gun violence and even contributed to his death.

It asks the question: why has America not learned its lesson on when to recognise the times of crisis caused by division when they arise?

Kirk is the latest in a series of political figures to be targeted as a result of their personal views. In June, Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were killed. In April, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was the victim of an arson attack when his residence was set on fire, and there was an attempted attack on Nancy Pelosi in 2022 that led to a fracture in the skull of her 82-year-old husband, Paul. This is irrespective of the time-stopping school shootings at Antioch High School in Nashville, Florida State University, and Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in 2025 alone.

Contained within the collective attacks is a dark parallel to the period in the mid-1960s, 60 years prior, that held the killings of leading civil rights activists Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, alongside sitting President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. The deaths spurned national heartache and inflamed similar political turmoil. It asks the question: why has America not learned its lesson on when to recognise the times of crisis caused by division when they arise?

Many have argued that the surge in politically motivated violent incidents in the United States is near another such breaking point. This makes the immediate response to this growing wound all the more important. Though prominent commentators on the right have rallied and decried the incident, arguing that the killing of Kirk is an attack on the entirety of the MAGA base, and blaming the left. The assassination has sparked their fervour and has been called a deliberate assault on conservative America. They have called for retribution in Kirk’s wake.

In the days following his death, the Trump administration and other prominent MAGA allies said that Kirk had a unique ability to reach young people in the United States with his work. On Thursday September 11, the 24th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump gave an official statement on Kirk’s murder from inside the Oval Office. In it, he said he was: “filled with grief and anger at the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.” He went on to say that the administration would deliver retribution to “organisations that fund and support the radical left”.

This cuts the legacy of Kirk, the family man bleeding out in front of his wife, child, and thousands of students at Utah Valley campus, against Kirk as the man who espoused views that led to the suffering, discrimination, and fear for the safety of others

The lack of a unifying message for the country, in the wake of an event that has provoked mass mourning, was highly uncharacteristic of a sitting president. It sat at odds with the speech Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) gave in the aftermath of the shooting, where he called for a time of national healing and a serious look at repealing stringent gun violence laws in Kirk’s wake. “It is an attack on all of us,” said Cox, adding, “It is an attack on the American experiment, it is an attack on our ideals.”

The portion of the country that disagreed with Kirk’s views may have found this less easy to swallow. People up and down America felt that Kirk’s ideas were antithetical to the ideals that made America a prosperous and welcoming nation. Many felt he peddled culturally and racially insensitive statements and rhetoric, and was a divider himself. This cuts the legacy of Kirk, the family man bleeding out in front of his wife, child, and thousands of students at Utah Valley campus, against Kirk as the man who espoused views that led to the suffering, discrimination, and fear for the safety of others.

At this checkpoint in time, the response to the murder speaks directly to the whirring dynamo of polarised viewpoints and irreconcilable perspectives held by Americans that cannot be sustained. Democratic former President Barack Obama shared his thoughts the week after the killing at an event in Pennsylvania. “I think those ideas were wrong, but that doesn’t negate the fact that what happened was a tragedy and that I mourn for him and his family,” he said, referring to rhetoric that Kirk had used, including calling his wife Michelle unqualified.

The lesson which America refuses to learn is this: the way to truly fight violence in the country is not with power or force but with consensus and cooperation

The reality that a message of humility comes not from Trump but instead from Obama speaks to the fact that partisanship and polarisation have been allowed to take root in the very core of United States politics. There must be an understanding in the aftermath of one man’s death that if the country does not row back from this divide and learn how to disagree better, the mechanisms for any robust debate that does not escalate to violence may be completely eroded.

At the beginning of his second term, in October 1984, former President Ronald Reagan, a Republican icon, said this: “We must condemn those who seek to divide us. In all quarters and at all times, we must teach tolerance and denounce racism, anti-Semitism, and all ethnic or religious bigotry wherever they exist as unacceptable evils.”

Somewhere along the way, this was lost. The parties have stopped talking about what they like about the country. People have stopped talking about what is still good about America. Instead, Republicans and Democrats talk endlessly about what they hate about each other.

That hate has been channelled into unnecessary death for the sake of political ends, and it will keep happening until unifying principles can be reabsorbed. The lesson which America refuses to learn is this: the way to truly fight violence in the country is not with power or force but with consensus and cooperation.