Charlie Kirk, the prominent American right-wing activist, was shot and killed while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on 10 September 2025. Ironically, he was engaged in a defence of the rights of Americans to possess firearms at the moment he was shot.

This marks a horrifying escalation of the already extreme hostility in the American political system, and whatever anyone thinks of Kirk’s views or his rôle in that system, his murder is to be deplored. Those displaying schadenfreude over the death should remember – the overwhelming majority of cases of political violence in America are committed by the extreme right (contrary to statements by President Trump), and when murder becomes a part of political engagement, everybody loses.

Having said that, it’s worth examining Kirk’s positions, so that the next Charlie Kirk can be met with argument and ridicule instead of violence.

“Owning the Libs” is an expression popular on the right of American politics. To “own” comes from gamer culture, and it means to defeat utterly and completely – to humiliate your opponent.

Charlie Kirk loved “owning the Libs”. Many commentators from the right have praised his willingness to participate in political debates with those of a different political opinion, as if that showed him to be a reasonable person, willing to engage in intelligent argument. But Kirk was anything but reasonable – he bullied, he hectored, he deflected the conversation onto safer ground for his case – anything to throw his interlocutors off-balance. Rather than using these debates as an exchange of ideas, it’s clear that he saw them as an opportunity to show off to his supporters and put down his opponents.

Kirk was a passionate supporter of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which is currently interpreted to mean that Americans are allowed to possess and carry firearms, with very few restrictions.

In April 2023, he said: “I think it's worth it. I think it's worth 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.”

It’s worth putting this in context; earlier in his statement (a response to an audience question), he compared gun deaths to the road toll. He gave a figure of 50,000 road deaths a year, and said that this was the unfortunate cost of allowing the general public to drive: “we have decided that the benefit of driving – speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services – is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road”.

OK, he’s treating this as a cost-benefit analysis, so let’s go along with that idea. We know the cost – in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available at the time of writing, nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States. That’s a very similar figure on the cost side of the ledger to the figure Kirk gives for the cost of allowing driving. So what about the benefit?

The benefits of driving are well understood. Perhaps future advances in Artificial Intelligence will make it possible to have the same quality of life without the individual needing to drive, but until then, America (along with the rest of the world) has accepted that the ability to drive is of net benefit to society.

And the benefits of gun ownership? Not hunting – Kirk stresses that this is of minor importance. Not personal defence either – this again is not the main benefit, according to Kirk. No, the benefit, as Kirk stated in that same article, is “so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government”.

This is batshit crazy. The idea that any group of individuals, however well supplied with the best weapons from the best gun stores, could mount an armed defence against a “tyrannical government”, with all the resources and personnel and weapons of the nation at its disposal, is utterly absurd. Yet this is the fanciful benefit that, according to Kirk, justifies the loss of 47,000 lives.

Let’s be clear – the way to defeat a tyrannical government is through democracy. And if the government manages to subvert the democratic process to the extent that it no longer functions to allow for the overthrow of the government, then the lesson of the 20th century is that mass peaceful civil disobedience – as deployed by, for example, Mahatma Ghandi – is the most effective way of defeating tyranny.

Kirk once said the he can’t stand the word “empathy”: “I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage”. Made up? New age? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word has been around for over 100 years.

I don't have the context for this quote, but I have to assume he had been challenged to have empathy for some of the individuals or groups he had been attacking, and he clearly had none.

One of the defining characteristics of our species is that we work together co-operatively to achieve goals that would not be possible alone, and the source of that co-operation is empathy.

Charlie Kirk had empathy alright, he just reserved it for people like himself. Kirk was privileged, white, male, cisgender and Christian, and he had empathy only for those who were like him in all of those respects.

(It’s worth noting at this point that while Kirk described himself as a Christian, his interpretation of Christianity was far removed from that of the mainstream churches. His selective reading of the Bible included passages that condemn homosexuality and support a subservient view of women, but did not include one of the most important passages in the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount. What is known in America as Christian Nationalism is deserving of a separate rant all of its own, but in the meantime the term should be understood as referring to right-wing individuals who profess to a belief in the Christian God, while failing to observe even the most basic Christian tenet of "love thy neighbour".)

Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, gave an address to supporters a few days after the shooting, in which she said, addressing the “evil-doers” responsible for her husband’s death: “you have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country and this world”.

Given her grief, she can be forgiven for the menacing tone of her comments, but if she’s hoping for the movement that Kirk founded to rise to greater heights after his death, I suspect she’s wrong. Kirk had a unique combination of energy, ambition and callousness, and I think it's unlikely that a successor will be able to attract the same following that he had.

But no-one should be complacent – while Kirk's movement may decline and wither following his death, who knows what corner of the right-wing swamp will give rise to the next demagogue with a charming smile and a vile set of values?