The senseless murder of Charlie Kirk was, and is, a powerful punch to the gut of a country that has witnessed more than its share of senselessness in recent years.
The sudden lethal event is extremely disorienting, even frightening, to many of us who think normally. Some may attempt to take advantage of the surrounding sadness and anger.
The 31-year-old father of two youngsters was doing what real leaders do in an open democracy, talking calmly to people about his beliefs and answering even hostile questions with equal calm.
The suddenness and finality of the lethal moment was initially revealed on a shocking video. That is now widely censored, but perhaps shouldn’t be.
There is evil in this world. That’s an eternal fact. Its human agents do awful things. Hiding the terrible effects of their acts will not make evil go away.
I would argue that hiding terrible things actually enhances their impact. The censored images of one man’s death now reside in the even more vivid imaginations of anyone who thinks about it. Which is how fear grows and metastasizes in the dark corners of our minds.
Of course, all the usual public suspects said the expected things at media photo ops. They recited the rote thoughts and prayers stuff. And some of them may even have been sincere.
One standout: Utah’s GOP Gov. Spencer Cox was different and eloquent. He called on his Mormon beliefs for healing, not accusing. “This is our moment,” he said. “Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp? It’s a choice.”
Many will staple their preferred narrative onto the immediate tragedy as evidence of their right thinking. That fixes nothing, but it's the easiest path.
These public and private performances do little in reality except help the speaker get through an awkward moment and sound really concerned, like saying “Sorry” when you step on someone’s foot in a dark movie theater.
Standby now for the hackneyed calls for a national conversation on violent language, guns, whatever. These conversations, too, are empty words because few of us listen to one another anymore. We're thinking of the comeback instead. Watch any congressional "hearing" on C-SPAN. It's not a hearing; it's a recitation of prepared remarks and gotchas.
So, national conversations accomplish nothing but fill news cycles with heated sound bites so TV can sell ED ads, and we can move on by doing nothing real.
I’m sorry if this sounds cynical. It isn’t. It’s frustration and anger after six decades of witnessing and writing about these regular convulsions of conscience over awful events that occur with tragic regularity. But never get seriously addressed. They are like some kind of national food poisoning that feels just awful at the time, then passes after an intense period. And we're so thankful they're over, we erase them from memory.
Until the next one.
But let’s have another tedious national conversation about solutions we already know have no chance of survival, like the dead targets of the perps.
There is nothing innately wrong with national conversations – if any of them actually ever did anything except talk, talk, talk with little listen, listen, listen. Yes, violent rhetoric is unhelpful, like top political leaders calling opponents Nazis. Yes, name-calling hurts. But these interminable chats don't end them.
They simply occupy a blizzard of news cycles for media that revel in conflict featuring police chiefs, pols, alleged ministers, and other angry folks playing to the cameras that gobble up sadness, violence, and tears like M&M’s for the eyes.
Here’s something to remember and a notable example we could build on: A conservative icon gets brutally murdered in front of shocked supporters.
And yet, what happens? Or, more accurately, what doesn’t happen? Somehow, no urban riots, no lootings, no teargas, no stoned and burning police cars. Just profound mass mourning on one side.
Kennedy. King. Kennedy. Almost Wallace. Almost Ford, twice in California. Almost Reagan. Almost Trump twice. Columbine High School. Buffalo food market. Parkland High School. Covenant School. Sandy Hook Elementary. Sutherland Springs Baptist Church…..
All of these killings and attempted assassinations and many others had one thing in common: To put it bluntly, all of the shooters were nuts, sick in the head.
Secret Service research some years ago found an overwhelming number of shooters, especially younger ones, gave advance signals of their violent intentions.
People around these shooters, including officials, knew it. No one did anything. So innocent people ended up dead.
By the time he was 19, the Parkland school shooter had been expelled and had 69 documented incidents of violence or violent threats. Yet he was still out and about in 2018 and able to murder 14 students, three teachers, and wound 17 others.
All because we as a society, and as individual families, refuse to address the real underlying issue of mental illness. It’s such an uncomfortable topic — right? -— just to suggest someone is sick in the head. Because, see, it's not visible and involves an individual’s civil rights. We’ll discover later more about the real motives and history of Kirk’s killer.
Having a mental illness engenders a perverse, blinding sympathy that cloaks the danger to others of a twisted mind. Claiming insanity can even prevent trials. During COVID, we thought nothing of forcibly separating family members, denying their shared presence even in their dying moments, with no legal recourse.
But somehow, sick in the head is different? We can't even talk about it.
What about all the innocent dead, who never heard of the perp before their last breath? They didn’t have lawyers. But they did have rights. Or should have.
Like Charlie Kirk, Iryna Zarutska was doing everything right. A refugee from the war in Ukraine, the 23-year-old woman sought peace and a fresh start in America. To get ahead in her new life in a new land, she was working the least desirable night shift at a Charlotte pizzeria.
On her way home on public transit last month, without warning, she was stabbed fatally in the neck multiple times by Decarlos Brown, a 34-year-old man who has surfed the justice system for the past 18 years. The incident was videotaped by security cameras, also now censored.
His most recent arrest came in January for misusing 911. He explained to police that someone had given him a “man-made” substance that controlled his actions. Even after such a cockamamie story, the judge released Brown without bail. And now an innocent legal immigrant is dead.
Brown had 14 prior arrests, some violent. The judge could have said, "This sounds crazy. Because it is. We should look into this guy." But the accused is a black man, who got another chance.
Iryna Zarutska did not.
Even the coverups for doing nothing about mental illness have coverups. The 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting saw Adam Lanza murder his mother with her own rifle, shoot his way into the school, and slaughter 20 children and six adults. His suicide saved court costs.
Barack Obama loudly proclaimed that something had to be done by Congress, not him. But here’s how serious Obama was about getting anything done: He handed the job off to the one and only Joe Biden, who has trouble with screen doors.
With his security detail, the vice president marched through the Capitol for the cameras, wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses indoors. As you would expect, nothing ever happened. And Obama could drop that hot potato to get back to campaign fundraising, like he did immediately after the four Benghazi murders.
A number of Sherlock Holmes commentators noted recently that the United States is a violent country. We had an eight-year revolutionary war and a four-year civil war. And Hollywood has told us endlessly about the Wild West. The U.S. has around 23,000 homicides per year, or about 63 killings daily; New Orleans has the highest murder rate. Chicago has the largest number, 288, in the first 255 days this year.
One of the reasons we study history – or should – is that much of what we think is new is actually old. The 1830s were a turbulent political time in the United States, and political rhetoric was extreme. Sound familiar?
John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina senator who had been vice president during Andrew Jackson’s first presidential term, had fallen out with the former general. In early January 1835, Calhoun called Jackson "a Caesar who ought to have a Brutus."
No social media then. So, we don’t know if a British immigrant named Richard Lawrence knew of that senator's urging. Lawrence had been a house painter, but found employment difficult to find after telling people that he was actually the rightful heir to the British throne and that President Jackson was preventing his coronation.
On Jan. 30, 1835, Jackson was attending a funeral at the Capitol. Lawrence stepped out from behind a pillar, aimed a derringer at Jackson’s heart, and pulled the trigger. It misfired.
As Army war veteran Jackson charged, Lawrence pulled another pistol. It too failed. The president beat him with his cane. Lawrence was deemed crazy and spent the last 15 years of his life in an insane asylum.
So, the first attempted presidential assassination by a crazy person was a failure. Four others would be successful, starting 30 years later with Abraham Lincoln.
That means just under nine percent of U.S. presidents are killed in office. And at least six other assassination attempts failed, including two in the past year.
