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They created this violent world. We're just forced to live in it. [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2025-09-10

Right-wing organizer Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood Wednesday.

The weapon wasn’t a handgun or hunting rifle. The single, long-distance shot appears to have come from a military-grade rifle. And that matters—because if it were up to liberals, weapons like that would be illegal to own.

If it were up to us, gun violence wouldn’t only matter when conservative royalty is killed. It would also matter when Democratic legislators are murdered, and especially when schoolchildren are slaughtered.

But it’s not just the guns. It’s the climate that President Donald Trump and his allies have built. Scholars call it “eliminationist rhetoric”: the idea that political opponents aren’t simply wrong, but evil, dangerous, and must be eradicated. It’s language that leaves no room for disagreement or coexistence, only destruction.

GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna gave us a perfect example with her post on X. In her first breath, she claimed she was sick of the rhetoric. In the next, she insisted that liberals and the media were to blame for Kirk’s murder—that by calling Republicans fascists, we “caused this.” She piled on grotesque charges that liberals were “doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence,” and “protecting criminals.”

So much for lowering the temperature. Conservatives like to spout that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” But according to Luna, the shooter didn’t kill Kirk—liberals did. That’s not calming the fire. That’s pouring gasoline on it.

And this isn’t the first time she’s done it. When one Democratic Minnesota legislator and her husband were murdered and another legislator critically injured in June, Luna blamed Gov. Tim Walz for planning to speak at an anti-Trump “No Kings” rally, which was canceled in the wake of the shootings. In her world, “hate” means nothing more than daring to disagree with Trump.

But disagreement is as old as America itself. Our country’s founding was based on an argument: federalists vs. anti-federalists. We’ve fought bitterly over slavery, civil rights, the Vietnam War, women’s rights, marriage equality—the list is long. Democracy has always been messy and loud.

Most of the time, conflict is channeled into more speech, more organizing, more politics. But history also shows the danger when one side decides that disagreement is intolerable. Slavery didn’t just divide us—it tore the nation into civil war. The Vietnam War triggered deep domestic unrest and violence. The lesson should be crystal clear: Once politics give way to eliminationism, the result is bloodshed.

That’s what makes this moment so dangerous. We are going to disagree—fiercely—especially with a government that is actively dismantling itself, sending military forces to invade American cities, and shredding democratic foundations. But the answer cannot be to silence opposition with threats of more violence. That isn’t democracy. That’s literally fascism, plain and simple.

Luna is right about one thing: Kirk’s family and his children didn’t deserve this. No child who loses a parent to gun violence deserves it. No parent who loses a child to it deserves it. And that is why liberal policies—like universal background checks and bans on weapons of war—would save lives. Maybe they even would have saved Kirk’s.

But instead, the right is already escalating. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is demanding political opponents be jailed under the pretext of “chaos” that conservatives themselves are fomenting—criminalizing dissent until nothing is left but obedience.

This isn’t calming anything down—it’s intensifying. With Trump incapable of even a shred of moral leadership, the ugliest impulses in our society are rewarded, and the flames fanned hotter. And history tells us where this road leads: When violence replaces politics, the body count climbs.

President Donald Trump shakes hands with moderator Charlie Kirk during a Generation Next White House forum on March 22, 2018.

Now this is their world. They fought for it, built it, and defended it—even when the victims were children, and certainly when they were Democrats.

Kirk himself admitted as much in 2023.

“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,” he told a rapt crowd at a Turning Point USA event. “It’s drivel. 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 to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

For Kirk, gun deaths weren’t a tragedy to be prevented, but a cost to be accepted. He called it prudent. Rational. And now his own family is paying the price.

So stop blaming liberals. We hate this shooting as much as conservatives do. The difference is we hate all the other shootings, too.

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