A Well Regulated Tragedy
Kirk’s killing exposes how the forgotten half of the Second Amendment fuels endless bloodshed and justifies new assaults on freedom.
Note: I’m going to try doing a more long-form essay on Friday posts. These may end up becoming something that is subscriber only since they are a bit more involved and a more self-reflective compared to the kind of content I’m working on producing normally.
Charlie Kirk is dead, and already his death has been turned into a tool. The assassination itself was shocking—Kirk gunned down at a college rally in Utah—but the reaction was almost pre-scripted. Within hours, conservative influencers were posting teary TikToks and reels, not to mourn, but to position his death as proof of liberal bloodlust. Trump, Stephen Miller, and others promised sweeping crackdowns on progressive organizations. Employers of liberal workers began receiving calls demanding that people be fired for failing to perform the proper level of grief, or for posting jokes online in poor taste. Grief, outrage, revenge—it has all become theater, a performance staged for political power.
Even in death, Kirk is doing the same thing he did in life. His career was never really about policy or persuasion; it was about provocation. His brand was “owning the libs” as a business model—convert outrage into airtime, airtime into donations, and donations into more stages. On campuses across the country, he manufactured spectacle by targeting marginalized people, baiting students into protest, and then monetizing their reactions. The outrage was the product. The suffering of others was simply the cost of doing business.
And now, in the aftermath of his killing, his death itself has been folded into that same cycle. Trump isn’t sitting in grief. He’s mobilizing—treating Kirk’s body the way Kirk treated every protest he ever courted: as a political asset, something usable, tolerable, even easy to disregard once it’s done its work. His death is not being mourned so much as leveraged.
There is some symmetry here. Kirk built his career by pointing at marginalized communities—immigrants, trans kids, women demanding autonomy—and daring liberals to care. If they didn’t, he mocked them as cowards. If they did, he declared victory because their anger became his platform. He was never interested in the pain of those he targeted. The point was to get white liberals to play the game, to show up at the protest, to yell at him onstage, to create footage he could feed into the conservative outrage machine. In that economy, minority suffering was always an acceptable loss. Their dignity, their fear, their rights—tolerable casualties in the battle for clicks and votes. Racism, misogyny, and cruelty weren’t glitches in the system. They were the system.
Look at what’s happening in response to his death. It’s not a pause for reflection, or a collective moment to think about how toxic our politics have become. Instead, it’s performative grief designed to harden authoritarian power. Trump promises new domestic terror lists targeting progressive groups. Miller warns of “shadowy networks” funding leftist violence. And on the ground, ordinary conservatives are calling the employers of liberal workers to say, “this person is being insensitive online and it’s disparaging to your company.” to get them fired. Kirk’s death is being used to justify a crackdown on speech, on organizing, on simple political disagreement. Just like his life, it’s less about him than about disciplining everyone else.
Performative grief isn’t about loss—it’s about control. It’s about reasserting the boundaries of who gets to speak, who gets to dissent, and who must be silenced. In this economy, the cost is always borne by the same people: marginalized communities and their allies, whose jobs, safety, and rights are treated as expendable so long as power is consolidated on the other side.
I should be clear about what my stance is. Violence, whether from the right or the left, is not acceptable. The left has overwhelmingly denounced the shooting. A few people have made crass remarks about karma, pointing out that Kirk once mocked school shooting survivors and dismissed the role of guns in mass killings. Maybe those comments are tasteless, but they are still free speech. That’s the line: disagreement, even hateful disagreement, is protected. Violence is not. I can condemn the assassin while still refusing to tolerate fascist ideology. The paradox of tolerance is this: a society that makes space for fascism will not remain free. But rejecting fascism does not require picking up a gun.
And yet, the gun is always there. That’s the part we can’t ignore. Kirk’s assassin had easy access to a firearm capable of turning anger into murder in an instant. That is the built-in consequence of our gun culture. We are told the Second Amendment exists to protect us from tyranny, anchored by that oft-forgotten, but equally relevant, bit about a “well regulated militia.” But how big does a militia have to be before it counts as anything other than a lone man with a grievance and a gun? A thousand people? A hundred? Two?
Ask yourself: if one armed person can claim the mantle of “resisting tyranny,” where does “well regulated” live—who sets the rules, who trains the unit, who is accountable to whom? Regulation can’t mean “no rules,” and militia can’t mean “whoever says the word first.” If a single shooter can self-deputize as a militia, then assassination becomes constitutional cosplay, and “public safety” is just whatever the last man with a rifle decided it was.
Gun absolutists insist the amendment prevents violence by deterring tyrants. But in practice, it is doing the opposite: it privatizes the decision to use political force, outsourcing life-and-death judgments to the angriest person in the room. If “the people” are the militia, then the public—not the shooter—should have a say in how arms are acquired, trained with, secured, insured, and used. Where is the “well regulated” in a universe of no training requirements, no accountability, no commander, no muster, no public control?
When disagreement meets ubiquitous guns, violence isn’t an aberration; it’s slowly becomes the default. A theory of liberty that lets one person decide when democracy has ended is not a theory of freedom—it’s a permission structure for bloodshed. If one man with a gun counts as a militia, then the Second Amendment isn’t preventing tyranny; it’s enabling a thousand tiny tyrannies, each armed, unaccountable, and ready to declare themselves the state.
Until we reckon with that—until “well regulated” means actual regulation, public standards, training, liability, storage, and consequences—every political argument will carry the risk of a bullet, and every bullet will be spun into the next justification for more authoritarian control. Guns don’t preserve democratic disagreement; they collapse it. And the rest of us pay the bill in lockdown drills, chilled speech, and bodies.
Kirk spent his entire career telling young conservatives that outrage was power, that triggering liberals was victory, showing them that pain could be monetized. Now he has become the ultimate example of his own lesson. His death has triggered liberals into condemnation, triggered conservatives into weaponized grief, and triggered his allies into promising crackdowns. He has been reduced to another spectacle, another viral clip, another excuse for authoritarian escalation.
Our system makes this kind of violence inevitable, and then immediately treats the blood as a political asset. That is the real cost of doing business in American politics today: lives lost, rights stripped, communities terrorized, and all of it folded into the machinery of outrage and control. The suffering is real. But it isn’t Kirk’s. It’s the suffering of the living, of those who will face surveillance, silencing, or harassment in the name of honoring a man who built his life on other people’s pain.
Tyranny doesn’t always come in jackboots and tanks. Sometimes it comes in the form of laws passed in the name of “safety.” Sometimes it comes in the form of neighbors calling your boss to demand you be fired. Sometimes it comes in the form of a culture where disagreement carries the risk of a bullet. Maybe the violence isn’t a bug, but a feature.
That’s what unsettles me most. We can talk about free speech, about tolerance, about resisting fascism without violence. And all of that is important. But none of it matters if we keep pretending that unlimited access to guns is compatible with democracy. It isn’t. It never has been. Guns do not preserve freedom. They collapse disagreement into bloodshed, and then hand authoritarian leaders the perfect excuse to take more power.
Kirk’s life was a lesson in how outrage can be commodified. And for those who wield his death as a weapon, his body is just another acceptable loss. Another cost of doing business.