Thursday, September 11, 2025

CHARLIE KIRK, DEFENDER OF TYRANNY, HAD SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT TYRANNY AND GUNS

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, many people are quoting an assertion he made in April 2023 at a Turning Point USA event in Salt Lake City.
You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — 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. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.



But I'd like to point out something else Kirk said just before that. It's not in the clip above, but it's in the transcript of Kirk's remarks:
The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers.
Or as he put it in a 2018 tweet:


The person who killed Kirk still hasn't been caught. We don't know the shooter's motive. It might not be political. The last president who was shot while in office was nearly killed by someone who was trying to impress an actress. In 2011, then-Congresswoman Gabby Gibbords was nearly killed by a young man who was obsessed with numbers.

But if this was about politics, and if the shooter was angry at Kirk from the left, please note that the gunman probably believed he was doing precisely what Kirk said Americans should do with guns. He probably believed, as millions of us do, that the government is now tyrannical and has now turned against its citizens. He may have known that Kirk's Turning Point was a key part of President Trump's get-out-the-vote operation.

I don't think that's justification for a political assassination -- and to be fair, Kirk talked about using political persuasion first, in another well-known clip, in which he was asked by a supporter (in October 2021, when Joe Biden was president), "When do we get to use the guns?"

"When do we get to use the guns? To k*ll these people" asks Charlie Kirk supporter (2021) Universal warning

[image or embed]

— Chris⚖️Justice (@chrisjustice01.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 5:04 PM

The questioner talks about "corporate and medical fascism" (it was a time of vaccine mandates) and asks, "How many elections are they going to steal?" Kirk agrees that "we are living under fascism," but he recommends remaining peaceful. His argument is strategic, not moral -- he never says that using guns would be evil, just more likely to lead to a government crackdown.

But there's the problem with saying that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to fight government tyranny: you don't get to choose when the owners of the guns decide it's time to reject peaceful protest and start shooting. Putting guns in the hands of millions of citizens and telling them not only that guns are okay but that they're wonderful, an extraordinary, God-given way to stave off fascism, means they get to decide when it's time to put that Plan B into effect. They might disagree with you politically and disagree with you about how long to remain non-violent.

In a New York Times obituary of Kirk, Ezra Klein writes:
The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too....

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.
Klein also writes:
... there is no world in which political violence escalates but is contained to just your foes. Even if that were possible, it would still be a world of horrors, a society that had collapsed into the most irreversible form of unfreedom.

Political violence is a virus. It is contagious.
Klein says it's "misguided ... to wrap Kirk’s death around his views." But while Kirk made a living as a non-violent persuader, he repeatedly argued that the Second Amendment's main purpose was to subject regimes in power to the permanent threat of violence. Any now Kirk is dead, quite possibly because someone had a definition of tyranny that was different from Kirk's and decided on a Second Amendment remedy.

In the video directly above, Kirk imagines what might happen if his fellow right-wingers don't fight the "fascism" of Joe Biden:
They're the ones that are willing to use federal force against us ... if you think for a second that they're not wanting you to all the sudden get that next level where they're going to say, "Okay, we need Patriot Act 2.0," if you think that, you know, Waco was bad, wait till you see what they want to do next.
This might fall under the category of "Every accusation is a confession," because Kirk's body wasn't cold before some of the most important influencers on the right were demanding just the sort of tyranny Kirk feared from Biden:


In a speech last night, the president of the United States said this was an excellent idea:
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.
George Soros didn't bankroll this shooting. ActBlue didn't process donations that paid for the gun or the bullet. Responsibility for this murder lies with the murderer.

But Trump, the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Miller, and their donors want to neutralize liberalism and the Democratic Party ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections -- ahead of all future elections, really -- and this gives them an additional pretext for a crackdown, in addition to the tanks on the streets that Charlie Kirk gleefully welcomed last month:
MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk celebrated President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” takeover of the nation’s capital by calling for the Trump administration to unleash a “full military occupation” of other large American cities “once we liberate” Washington, D.C. ...

During his podcast on Monday, Kirk ... urged Trump to send more American military forces into other cities in short order....

“I guarantee the crime's gonna go... way down,” he proclaimed. “And then the media will say, oh, it's only going down because he brought in the military. Exactly. We need full military occupation of these cities until the crime desists. Period.” ...

“... We got to go hard. We gotta go big league. We're talking National Guard, tanks — every street, you need military.”
Did that seem like tyranny to the person who shot Kirk? It seems like tyranny to me. I wouldn't shoot anyone -- but when you say that guns are good, especially in defense of freedom, some people will take you seriously and literally.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:07 AM

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