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The Evil of the Murder of Charlie Kirk

The Evil of the Murder of Charlie Kirk

Last updated on: September 15, 2025 at 11:08 am by James F. McGrath

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The Evil of the Murder of Charlie Kirk 2025-09-15T11:08:22-04:00 James F. McGrath

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I am hearing a lot of voices circulating on social media that make me think the individuals in question to not believe that murder, such as the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, is evil.

Right wing personalities respond to murder of Charlie Kirk by saying 'we are at war'

You may be surprised when I clarify that I am hearing this mostly from people who fit under the MAGA label. So let me explain.

So many tweets and other statements have said about this lone gunman, whatever his motives and ideology, that “they” have started a war.

The implication is twofold. First, that the individual was acting on behalf of “them,” the imagined coherent force that Donald Trump has in mind (presumably as a result of watching too much Newsmax) when he refers to the “radical left lunatics.” The second is that the response to the murder of Charlie Kirk should be the indiscriminate murder of those whom they perceive to be Kirk’s equivalent on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. I could be wrong, but that is usually what it means to say that killing an individual has “started a war.” They shot one of our troops, and so we must return fire.

This suggests that, while so many are praising Kirk as a Christian martyr, and condemning his murder, at least some of those individuals do not in fact agree with the viewpoint that murder is inherently evil in principle.

They merely think that the target was wrong.

Objecting to murder only when it is someone you care about is not being anti-murder. I am anti-murder. I can call and have called the murder of Charlie Kirk evil, with no qualifications or hesitations. There is no need to add any “but he” and it would be inappropriate to do so — although when people point out that Kirk said that shootings are the fair price to pay for the right to bear arms, one can perhaps understand why that additional observation might be felt relevant in this context.

I am tempted to try to claim the label “radical left lunatic” for myself and get it on a t-shirt, with a list of the things that characterize my stance, which is far to the left of the vast majority of the U.S. Democratic Party. I want socialized medicine, where healthcare is completely separated from profit, and no one has to worry that they cannot afford to pay their medical bills. I want equal rights and freedom for people of all shades of skin color, all religions, all sexual identities and orientations, and all opinions. I support free access to education at the very least through high school and collective funding for that. I am a radical left lunatic who wants to build up, improve upon, and go even further beyond all those positive things that the MAGA movement has been tearing down lately.

Murder of Charlie Kirk leads MAGA to "declare war" on the left As a Christian radical left lunatic, my work for this is always nonviolent. But I don’t have any disrespect for those who think that weapons have a place, that violence is justified in self-defense. I don’t have any disrespect for those who think that a convicted murderer, after a fair trial, ought to receive the death penalty.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was carried out with a long range sniper rifle. That is not a weapon of self-defense. If Charlie Kirk was or had been armed on the day he was shot, it would not have been useful for defending himself. Certain types of weapons are useful only for murder and assassination. Many people in the Democratic Party, who are to my right on most other things and so do not deserve to be labeled “radical left lunatics”, agree in wanting to restrict the circulation of at least these kinds of weapons. Perhaps there is an appropriate place for them for use in hunting. As a city-dweller my whole life, I am no expert in this. All I will say is that there must be a way to allow for the hunting of animals and prevent the hunting of humans. Other countries have managed to do it. We could find a way to do it, and make America great in this area for the first time.

That’s a discussion that I think is worth having, but it is for another time. Although the fact that shootings at schools and in other places continue to happen at a steady pace, I feel as though in the present moment there is an even more urgent issue than limiting the circulation of weapons that are only useful for warfare and mass murder.

What drives most of those who commit murder, whether it be of many schoolchildren or one influencer, is anger and hatred. While fostering those things is unhealthy, I would hesitate to label them as forms of mental illness. When people blame shootings on mental illness, at any rate, they are usually distracting from rather than pointing out that the killers are mostly people who are at least technically sane yet very angry, people who have no abnormal imbalances in their brain chemistry but who have fostered hatred towards others.

Most of all, they are people who do not think that murder is wrong, as long as the murderer thinks that the choice of victim is appropriate.

I hope that we can unite in mourning the murder of Charlie Kirk as inherently evil, without qualification. A human life was snuffed out. It does not become less reprehensible if the victim was not a nice person.

I hope that we can unite in that point, and all agree that murder itself is evil. The murder itself was wrong, and not just the choice of victim.

If you cannot agree on that, then I think that I can safely say that you are not a Christian – and you may not pretend to be. Neither are you a supporter of democracy, nor a law-abiding citizen of the United States.

Some reading this may be fine with not being in any of those categories. But I hope enough will aspire to be in one of them to agree on this shared principle: murder is wrong, regardless of who is the victim. The murder of Charlie Kirk was wrong. To murder anyone else imagining that it would be “fair” because “they” killed “one of ours” would be wrong as well.

Because it is not just a Christian or “Judeo-Christian” or Abrahamic principle that murder is wrong. It is a much more widely-held human perspective. And if we cannot agree on it, then there is little hope for our future.

General Christian

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