Kirk's Price for Liberty, Paid by Those Too Young to Know the Rights They Died For

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Content Warning: This piece contains discussion of gun violence, including school shootings and the deaths of children, as well as references to sexual violence and forced pregnancy.

This is a piece I have poured my heart and soul into. Whatever your political views, I ask only that you bear witness.

Of everything I’ve ever written, nothing has felt as painful as this. America has gone too far. What happens when a majority of America mourns for another white man? A man killed by his own philosophy? What happens when his cruelty becomes a legacy and still earns the very empathy that he condemned? What happens when the grief of a nation bends toward the powerful, while the powerless die unnoticed? What happens when we choose the wrong graves to cry over? 

America is mourning a man who once denounced empathy, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up, new age term that does a lot of damage.” A man who told an audience, “We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty... But 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.” A man who, when pressed if he was comparing abortion to the Holocaust, doubled down and said, “Absolutely I am. In fact, it’s worse.”

Meanwhile, the nation is quiet when the coffins are small. There have been 146 school shootings this year alone, with 29 students dead as a result. These numbers have become routine. Kirk claimed they were the cost of liberty. But I see them. In this moment, I mourn for them and only them. I imagine the five year old girl who just got new light up Skechers, excited to get to show all of her friends her new shoes at school. I imagine the 13 year old who thought his biggest problem of the day would be one on his math test, not figuring out where to hide in a small classroom. I think about the 16 year old who was playing basketball outside Windsor Elementary School, focusing on getting his next basket. Maybe he wanted to join the NBA. I think of Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, 8 and 10, killed during school Mass. Just participating in prayer. This is just children at school. Not to mention the people who have died from accidental shootings, like 2 year old Kh’aden Johnson after he found a loaded gun in his house. These are the faces erased by a country too busy crying for a man who called their deaths “worth it.” 

More than 398,000 students are estimated to have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine shooting in 1999. I am one of them. When I was a kid, I felt like nothing could hurt me except the occasional fall. Now, I carry the fear, the confusion, and the stories etched into me when the world stopped feeling safe. 

In late 2021, someone brought a gun to a nearby school in my district. We were told to stay in our classrooms and keep learning, as if AP Bio work could have protected us. One of my friend’s sisters broke her ankle trying to escape the gunman, five feet away from her. That day gave every student in Winston-Salem, NC a lesson that shouldn’t have to be taught: the promise of safety was always a lie. 

When I came to American University a year later, I thought maybe I could leave part of that fear behind. But one late afternoon, as I stepped onto the Tenleytown Metro escalator, there was a gunman waiting at the bottom. Everyone fled, running as fast as they could up the escalator, sprinting into the streets. It was one of the most isolating moments of my life, feeling like survival was just a matter of seconds and luck. 

We come to college believing we’ve escaped school shootings, that we’ve outgrown the shadow of lockdown drills and whispered theories about where a gunman is. But the truth is, violence follows us, no matter where we are. It waits at street corners, classrooms, in the quiet places where we once thought we were safe, where a single shot can decide who goes home and who doesn’t. 

Kirk didn’t bat an eye at gun violence: he referred to it as liberty. Kirk thought that the public’s terror, broken bones and graves were worth it. He didn’t think of the fathers who will never get to walk their daughters down the aisle. He didn’t think of the mothers left in shambles when their child’s name is called and no one walks across the stage. He never thought about the freedom lost when a bullet decides a future will never come: the freedom to live. 

He didn’t even think of this freedom when it came to his own daughter. When asked about if his daughter was raped at 10 if he would force her to carry it, he responded, “The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.” I can only think of his daughter, three years old now, someday reading those words, learning that her father would have condemned her to such violence. I cannot comprehend the weight of the knowledge that her own father would force her to be used as a vessel. 

For those who say they were traumatized by the footage of Kirk’s assassination, it’s what he would have wanted. He believed that children should watch these, and that they should be sponsored, claiming that watching executions would, “make his day better.” America was forced to look at the spectacle he craved, and yet still chooses to cry for him. 

America did not react this way to Black people being killed. When a Black student dies in a school shooting, the country shrugs and scrolls past. Though Black students make up only 16.6% of the school population, 33% of them have experienced school shootings. Their pain is doubled by the violence itself and then by the silence that follows. When a Black man is murdered by police, his record is debated before mourning his life. But when a white man like Kirk is gunned down, suddenly the nation is in anguish, suddenly compassion becomes infinite. The pedestal of whiteness is what grants him the tears denied to the very children whose deaths he called “worth it.”

We all saw the country take sides. Silence was its own side. To mourn so deeply for a white conservative man who built a youth movement on cruelty while ignoring the children, the mothers, the lives destroyed by his ideology: that is the definition of complicity. This is the America that we live in today. A nation desensitized to atrocity, where even progressives mistake selective grief for empathy. You can cry for a man like Charlie Kirk if you choose. But if you opened your eyes to everything else happening, murders in Gaza, school shootings, mass violence, you would never stop crying. That is the difference. That is the choice we have made. 

Source: USA Today