The assassination of Charlie Kirk

On September 10, 2025, America lived through a grotesque encapsulation of its most enduring sickness.

In Utah, Charlie Kirk — a conservative firebrand who built an empire on campus rallies and devotion to Trump — was gunned down in broad daylight as he addressed a rally at Utah Valley University. The shot came from hundreds of yards away, fired with precision. Kirk died later, only 31 years old, and the political class reeled with bipartisan shock at the murder of a polarizing but potent figure — an important voice in the land. There’s a video of Kirk being hit by a bullet in the neck while addressing the audience — perhaps the most shocking such exemplar involving the murder of a well-known figure since JFK. There’s a search on for the killer.

Barely an hour later, 500 miles to the east, chaos unfolded at Evergreen High School in suburban Denver. A teenage gunman apparently opened fire, leaving three students critically injured—one of them apparently the shooter himself. Terrified parents were herded to a reunification site; familiar images of armored officers clearing hallways; another American community joined the endless list of places scarred by gun violence.

Two episodes, different in character but united by their timing, point unmistakably to the same underlying reality: a country drowning in firearms. Sure, Kirk was almost certainly a victim of political polarization, but also of the ease of access to weapons. The right to bear arms, once meant as a hedge against tyranny in an 18th-century world, has metastasized into a license for carnage.

So everyone should simply know the facts:

• The World Population Review found that the US suffers 11 firearm-related deaths per hundred thousand. In Britain, where guns are massively illegal, it’s 0.24 – more than forty times less. In Japan it’s over 100 times less. Australia, which had a similar problem, saw its numbers go down to European levels pretty much immediately.
• The US, with less than 5% of the world’s population, accounts for about a third of its mass shootings.
• About 80% of US homicides are firearm deaths.
• When the decade-old assault weapons ban was allowed to expire in 2004, gun deaths almost immediately went up by some 20%. President Biden proposed renewing it two years ago but that went nowhere, and even a minor effort to require licenses for assault weapons languishes in subcommittee.
• Having spent my adult life living abroad and seeing how dozens of other countries handle weapons, I am convinced that this is a national madness, one that persists because of cultural worship of the gun, political cowardice, and the raw power of the firearms industry. Nowhere else where I’ve ever lived – all over Europe, the Middle East and also the Caribbean – are schools regularly attacked. In the US, guns are now the number one cause of death in children. There have been 47 shootings at schools this year so far.

  Until America admits that the problem is not just “bad people with guns” but the sheer saturation of guns themselves, it will remain hostage to daily massacres, from campuses to classrooms to city streets to campus rallies. It was a point I made a while back in a TV debate with Jobob Taeleifi of the Daily Caller, who seemed truly to believe the problem is too few weapons, insufficient knowledge about guns, and a “mental health issue.”

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  Really?

  The World Population Review ranks the US atop the developed world with 12.2 gun deaths per 100,000 people (almost four times the next-highest, Finland, which is itself an outlier), with only countries like Colombia, El Salvador, Venezuela, Swaziland and Jamaica performing worse. Most European countries suffered under 1.5 deaths per hundred thousand people – almost 10 times lower than the US.

• What is the only factor that correlates to the gun violence? The level of gun ownership and the ease of purchasing highly dangerous weapons. The US ranks number one in the world by far in guns per people, with 120.5 guns per 100 people – double the figure in runners-up Falkland Islands and Yemen and four times the rate in even the most well-armed developed country. It has more guns than people.

  The irony, of course, is that Charlie Kirk was among the staunch defenders of America’s gun culture. Like many others, he made gun ownership part of the conservative identity, a badge of defiance against what he called government tyranny. Such activists will use tortured logic and convoluted arguments to convince Americans that there is no connection between having by far the highest level of gun ownership in the developed world (a third of Americans own a gun) and having by far the highest rate of firearm deaths in the world. They will wheel out the cliche “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” — when the obvious truth is that people with guns kill people.

• What’s amazing is that this most political of issues carries no visible consequences for those responsible, meaning primarily the Republican Party. That suggests the United States has ceased to be a rational society, which would greatly impact all humanity. So the weapons lobby and its adherents will stick to their proverbial guns no matter what in order to preserve their twisted ideas about freedom, so no arguments or logic will win them over.

  Most Americans, in fact, want greater gun control, as every survey shows — but they have given up. Perhaps the breathtaking, heart-stopping video will further move the needle. My aim is therefore to persuade the persuadable – not so much that gun control is needed but that it is possible. When one speaks to rational people who do not share the gun obsession, numerous arguments come up.

  • One of them is race: the idea that America’s large black minority is so disenfranchised and the whites are so racist that nothing can prevent madness in their interactions. This is belied by the fact that other countries had slavery and other countries have large and potentially restive ethnic and racial minorities, from Britain and France to Brazil and Israel. None suffer gun violence of the sort.
  • Then we have the distorted reading of the Second Amendment. Passed in an era when there there were muskets but no submachine guns and also no dishwashers, it promises a right to “keep and bear arms” within “a well-regulated militia.” Conservatives’ insistence on interpreting this as an unlimited right assigned to all individuals is absolutely preposterous.
  • Of late we have the mental health misdirection. The World Health Organization reports the percentage of Americans with depression is 5.9%, compared to 4.7% in Canada, 5.9% in Australia and 4.5% in the UK. Other mental health metrics show similar results. Mental health is a serious problem but the US is not an outlier.
  • • Lastly, we have the notion that change is impossible because the electoral system is so stacked in favor of the Republicans. Indeed it is. As one example, reliably Republican Wyoming has the same two senators as California, which has 70 times the population. Essentially, because of the spread of conservative across a swath of tiny states, a third of the national population can come close to controlling the Senate and with it the country. Only focus and determination will overcome this.

    In our debate, Jobob tried another, especially absurd gambit: he argued that the problem is that that Americans don’t know enough about weapons. “We have a huge misunderstanding about how firearms are used, how they work,” he hypothesized, adding that the most egregious ignorance is found in Congress, where “you have a populace that is entirely unaware of how guns work” yet dares to legislate on the issue. I was about to say that Congress doesn’t do very much at all, and the mild-mannered Fullerton looked like his head just might explode. But the host mercifully put an end to the proceedings.

  • The notion that there is nothing to be done is horribly dispiriting because it suggests a collapse of hope itself — and hope is essential to human well-being. That’s why the last thing rational Americans should do is repeat the tired urgings to not “politicize the discussion.” It is an acquiescence that amounts to an abdication of democracy, because it enables the Republicans to continue to pay almost no political price for pursuing policies that harm the country and are opposed by most people. Rest assured that if Democrats were guilty of such a thing, no one would hesitate to politicize it.

    Almost every Republican in Congress opposes gun control, goaded into this position by the well-funded National Rifle Association. When they control one of the chambers, as they do the House of Representatives today, change is hopeless. But even when the Democrats have a majority, as they do now in the Senate, a handful of them from rural states join the Republicans in keeping sanity at bay.

    That leaves the states, which can enact their own laws – and so some Blue states like California indeed have tighter checks in place. That’s good, but you can easily carry weapons across state lines.

  • But this rolling national disaster will not be fixed by timid Democratic attempts to forge bipartisanship, such as we saw during the Biden Administration. What is needed is a renewed ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, a massive move to limit new purchases of guns, and serious conditions and background checks for gun licenses. Criminals or anyone else caught with unlicensed guns should be jailed for long years. There should be a requirement for insurance on guns, the same as cars.

    Americans aren’t just not especially mentally unwell, they are absolutely as rational as others: faced with this new reality, the situation would pretty quickly wind down, as it did in Australia, where gun deaths fell from American to European levels very quickly after it banned most guns a few years ago. That country has individualism and a frontier mentality as well; it also, like America, has rational people.

    The Republicans will never agree to this and the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would probably try to strike down some of the measures. The Supreme Court is, at this point, a political body dominated by the Republican Party. This is what happens when the (wildly non-majoritarian) Senate in effect appoints judges – another rarity among developed democracies.

    Dealing with the court will be much easier when and if the Republicans have been routed; they are responsible for this unacceptable situation, and anyone voting for them in next year’s midterms is complicit in continuing a gun madness that is America’s only unusual mental health issue.