Recoil

Reactions to the shooting death of Charlie Kirk are everywhere, and that means that LinkedIn is no exception. What I noticed, however, was that the mentions of Mr. Kirk's life and views were all really anodyne, and stripped of the things that made him such a controversial figure. Mr. Kirk's advocacy for gun rights wasn't the thing that stood out about him and Turning Point USA to many of his critics. After all, one could plausibly make a case that Mr. Kirk was a White Supremacist, and to many in the LGBT community, he was an open bigot.

And that becomes the problem. Because there seems to be an unspoken idea that if it's admitted to that Charlie Kirk was a bad person by some or another standard, that his shooting becomes justified. And so people who want to make the point that political violence has gotten out of hand, or that it's wrong to celebrate the death of another human being wind up needing to sanitize his image, in order to make caring about his fate acceptable.

But it shouldn't need that. Okay, a case can be made that Charlie Kirk was a right jackass. That's an awfully low bar to justify a shooting.

And maybe that's all that needs to be said about it. Charlie Kirk didn't need to be a hero to everyone for his death to be a tragedy, and an unnecessary (if not wholly unexpected) one at that. But this is what a combination of hate, fear and distrust do to a nation where it's easy to be armed. Whether Charlie Kirk was legitimately a source of that hate, fear and distrust is beside the point. Even without him, it would have been there. It was Mr. Kirk's high public profile that made him a target of it. And his death exacerbates it.

Which means that, before long, it will hunt down someone else. And if that person may have had a hand in it, that will be excused, at least by some, in the understanding that humanity in death is something that must be deserved, rather than simply being something that everyone has some entitlement to.