Today is a stark, bleak, morally abhorrent warning that violence and democracy cannot coexist. Charlie Kirk — founder and CEO of Turning Point USA and a fiercely driven young father — was an important force in the MAGA campaign. A prominent figure in youth politics, Kirk galvanized attention but also earned backlash for his unwavering defense of gun rights and intense rhetoric towards easing prerequisites to gun ownership. Today at Utah Valley University, mid-sentence, as he addressed a rebuttal on the point of transgender shootings in America, a single shot rang out from a nearby building, hitting him in the neck. An hour later, he was pronounced dead. Charlie Kirk’s death is a terrifying case of the line between free speech and threat being crossed. This moment is a turning point. Regardless of political affiliation; Americans cannot flirt with incendiary rhetoric and then feign shock when the temperature rises. Political violence negatively affects us all. We must recommit to civil dialogue and unify against political violence, no matter the perpetrating source. Kirk’s tragic death on a school campus, the intention, execution and outcome, is forever memorialized as a sobering warning that free speech is suffocated in the grip of fear. 

Written by: A.M., 17

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