Charlie Kirk And The Cost Of US Gun Culture [Op-Ed]

Charlie Kirk, a staunch Christian conservative, once dismissed the slaughter of strangers as a tragic but necessary price of freedom. “I think it’s worth it,” he said, “to have, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Those words dripped with the smugness of someone who believed he’d never be among the casualties. For men like Kirk, death is for the anonymous, the expendable, the “statistics.” It is a chillingly casual calculus. Some people must die. Faceless. Nameless. And conveniently out of sight so that the myth of American gun liberty can march on untouched.

Now, Charlie Kirk himself has become the “cost.”

On a September afternoon in the red state of Utah, a bullet found his neck during a Turning Point USA event. Suddenly, the man who shrugged off other people’s blood as patriotic inevitability bled out for his own cause. 

In the final minutes before that shot rang out, he was answering a student’s question about transgender shooters. When asked how many there had been in the past decade, Kirk sneered, “Too many,” to cheers from the crowd. He had just doubled down on the fiction that trans people are a unique danger when statistically, the overwhelming majority of America’s mass shooters are straight white men.

So, the cruel symmetry is this: though the investigation is ongoing, it is far more likely that Kirk was shot not by the marginalized community he vilified, but by someone who looked like his base, his audience, his voters. Someone like him—a straight white man. The very profile responsible for the overwhelming bulk of America’s gun carnage.

And if I’m wrong, I’ll eat my words. But history and statistics rarely are.

In the hours after the shooting, you could already see the machine Kirk built cranking into motion, polishing the story, inflating the meaning, and turning him into a victim-saint of gun culture. 

Just a few months ago, a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were murdered in their home by a right-wing Christian posing as a police officer. That killing was treated as a local tragedy, quickly absorbed by the news cycle. Contrast that with Kirk, the poster boy of MAGA ideology, and you can already see the difference. His shooting is being elevated into myth, spun into martyrdom, and polished into propaganda.

The headlines already read like scripture: “Charlie Kirk shot during campus event.” His name will be etched into speeches about God-given rights, as though a bullet baptized him into the pantheon of conservative heroes.

Conservatives rushed to crown him a martyr, a sacrificial lamb of the Second Amendment, proof that even their most loyal zealots are under siege. House Speaker Mike Johnson led a moment of silence and prayer for Charlie Kirk in the House of Representatives. So did the New York Yankees before last night’s game. Former presidents, senators, and preachers tweeted out prayers. His name was folded into the script of American gun mythology. 

And in the flood of reaction posts, some painted him as a man always willing to “sit down for civil debate,” conveniently forgetting that his rhetoric was never civil. Tate Reeves, governor of Mississippi, wrote on X: “This is a truly dark day for America.  Charlie Kirk led discussions—debating in good faith with his political opponents.  He was the perfect example of what civil political engagement should look like.”

But Kirk’s rhetoric was violent, demeaning, and designed to radicalize. 

Tate and others claimed that “the left decided that assassination and violence is their response to debate,” a premature spin given that the shooter hadn’t been caught and nothing was known about their politics or motive. 

What’s truly revolting isn’t just that Charlie Kirk is being canonized; it’s who’s doing the canonizing, and what it says about this country. 

The story they’re telling is a lie dressed up as virtue. They repeated the tired, hollow chorus, “there’s no place for political violence in America,” as if centuries of lynchings, assassinations, coups, and insurrections weren’t already the bedrock of American politics.

But this isn’t martyrdom. It’s feedback.

Martyrs die for higher ideals like justice, truth, and freedom from tyranny. They face the gallows because they refused to betray their conscience, or the firing squad because they stood on the side of liberation. Charlie Kirk is not that. He’s a man who made a fortune off of stoking fear, turning young people into foot soldiers of white grievance, and building a political brand where violence is an acceptable byproduct of freedom. He didn’t give his life for justice. He didn’t fall for truth. He got caught in the crossfire of the very culture he championed.

This is what happens when you normalize violence as liberty. This is what happens when you recast school shootings as ideological props, like when Kirk’s platforms amplified false, anti-trans conspiracy spins instead of focusing on victims. You dismiss trauma, weaponize identities, and body counts become political fodder. Sooner or later, that circle of blood closes in on you.

The circle usually closes on the vulnerable first. Black and Brown neighborhoods where police are more likely to shoot than protect. Women stalked by abusers armed with easily purchased firearms. Children who find pistols in their parents’ nightstands. Whole clasFsrooms shattered by a single AR-15. America’s gun death toll is not spread evenly; it’s structured, racialized, and predictable. Charlie Kirk wasn’t worried about those deaths. He accepted them, justified them, and rationalized them. Until one of those “acceptable” bullets came for him. 

But don’t expect honesty in how his story is told. Expect spectacle. Expect talking heads to insist his shooting proves why more guns are necessary, not fewer. 

And if his supporters are determined to enshrine him, let’s be clear about what they’re sanctifying: the casual acceptance of slaughter. Not courage, not sacrifice, not justice, but the endless recycling of bodies for profit, politics, and power. 

And here’s where the irony sharpens. Charlie Kirk wasn’t just a foot soldier in America’s gun cult. He was a salesman. He toured campuses, conferences, and churches, grooming young conservatives to believe that blood is the price of liberty. He taught them to sneer at grieving mothers and call their cries for gun reform emotional manipulation. He taught them that a nation drowning in bullets was still the greatest place on Earth, because anything less than absolute access to firearms would be tyranny.

Now, the salesman has become the product. His body is the billboard. His wound is the advertisement. Had he survived, he would have stood on stage with a scar and called it proof of his convictions. But he’s dead now, and his supporters will taxidermize his image into the pantheon of right-wing saints. Either way, the lie will keep selling.

That’s the genius and the horror of America’s gun mythology: it can turn any corpse into propaganda.

But what if we refused that? What if we stripped the sanctimony away and said out loud what this really is? Not courage. Not sacrifice. Not divine will. Just another casualty in a country so addicted to firearms that even its most loyal apostles can’t escape the carnage.

Because if Charlie Kirk’s story becomes martyrdom, then every child gunned down in a school was a martyr too. Every accident, every stray bullet ripping through drywall. But we don’t call them martyrs. We call them “statistics.” We tell their families to move on. We bury them in silence. We send “thoughts and prayers.”

That’s the moral rot here. Not just that Kirk is being elevated, but that millions of others never will be. His blood is politicized, their blood is erased. His wound is a symbol; their wounds are collateral damage. He will be remembered; they are all forgotten.

Charlie Kirk is the logical conclusion of the very ideology he preached: a nation where bullets are background noise, where lives are expendable, where freedom is measured in body bags. His story doesn’t redeem the gun culture. It exposes it.

And if we have any collective sanity left, that’s how this moment should be remembered. Not as a holy sacrifice, but as a warning. A flashing red sign that says: This is the America you built. This is the America you defend. And if you keep worshipping at the altar of the gun, then one day, your own prophets will bleed at it too.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

SEE ALSO:

Charlie Kirk Shot And Killed Answering Gun Violence Question

Charlie Kirk Pushes ‘Great Replacement Theory’ In Rant Against Protesters

Trump Campaign, Racist Charlie Kirk Group Team Up

Charlie Kirk Defends Racist Ole Miss Student

Charlie Kirk Racially Profiles Black Pilots

What Is A ‘White Boy Summer’?

Charlie Kirk Confirms Mediocre White Man Status

Read more