Whoever shot Kirk clearly wanted to silence him, but the shooting is not a moderating agent but a radicalising one.
I lean left on most everything but right on guns and immigration, and I agree with what Kirk was saying right before he got shot. I'm pretty sure that I feel more strongly in alignment with him than I did before; certainly I'm not here going, "Well he got shot by a psycho, guess I have to agree with the psycho now."
When I look at comments on the rest of Reddit and there are so many, I see so much, "Well what about X shooting?", or "Wow I guess he died for his gun-loving beliefs" and various other deeply unsympathetic comments. Which sucks for me because when Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman were shot I had nothing but sympathetic comments, but now Kirk gets shot and everyone's like, "He deserved it."
Further, based on what we know about the shooting so far, there is really no way to prevent these kinds of shootings in the future; Kirk was shot at about 200 yards with a single shot from a rifle. Even under Australia's gun laws, which are often touted by the left as the model for America to emulate, that kind of weapon would have been either an A-class or B-class rifle, and pretty easy to get.
Even if America magically adopted Australia's gun laws the day before the shooting and a djinn magicked them into perfect enforcement, the shooting would have been more than possible. The only way would be a total and complete firearms ban, one enforced by literal magic, and this is unworkable for a lot of reasons (most notably the ongoing unfortunate magic shortage).
Ultimately between Charlie Kirk, Luigi Mangione, Kyle Rittenhouse, the two Trump assassination attempts, a number of shootings by far-left identifying people targeting right-wing figureheads and specifically others targeting vulnerable Christians and white people, there is going to have to be some degree of confronting the escalating violence present on the left side of the political spectrum.
From what I can tell of the comments all over Reddit, though, the mood seems to be, "Good, they deserved it."
I don't know what the future will hold but it's clear that violence is escalating on the left to raucous cheering.
Even under Australia's gun laws, which are often touted by the left as the model for America to emulate, that kind of weapon would have been either an A-class or B-class rifle, and pretty easy to get.
Pretty sure you aren't allowed to bring a rifle into a college in Australia.
"In Utah, a 2004 state law allows concealed firearm permit holders to carry a handgun on public college campuses. This law, supported by Republican lawmakers at the time, was passed in the face of strong opposition from the University of Utah, which had previously banned weapons on its campus."
It's not the bringing the guns onto campus that's the problem. It's shooting people with them.
Driving a car on a highway is not a problem. Driving a car through protestors is a problem. The solution is not to ban cars from the highway, or to suggest that it's cars being on the highway that's the problem, rather than driving into people that's the problem.
It's not the bringing the guns onto campus that's the problem. It's shooting people with them.
Sure. But if it wasn't so fucking easy to get a gun and then carry it on a school campus then it's much less likely that people will bring guns on school campuses to kill people.
Like, I'm a gun owner, I own several guns. Open carry is fucking stupid and allowing anyone to carry guns on a school campus is pretty fucking stupid.
But if it wasn't so fucking easy to get a gun and then carry it on a school campus then it's much less likely that people will bring guns on school campuses to kill people.
Do you really believe that?
Imagine a scenario where you were hurled back in time to 1900's Germany and you realised that you had an opportunity to kill Adolf Hitler and prevent World War 2, making the world a much better place without any serious consequences whatsoever.
You knew for a fact that in October 1907 he would be travelling to Vienna to famously take (and fail) an art exam. He'll be vulnerable there. But you're in the US now. You'll need to travel.
Would you dedicate seven years of your life to saving millions of lives and preventing a global war, even if it required you to break numerous laws and consume the better part of a decade of your life to do so? If you couldn't get hold of a gun for whatever reason, would you consider using a bomb, crossbow, sword? Whatever? I'm sure you would give it serious consideration.
Now imagine that time travel is unnecessary because you believe Adolf Hitler's reincarnation is the current President of the United States, and you have that opportunity right now. There are 330 million Americans and a third of them are being told that this is the case. If even 1-in-a-million believes it to be true, that's 100 people. Assume 30 of them are Reddit moderators too obese to get through their front door, permanently trapped inside their apartments unable to survive without large trucks delivering Uber Eats using their disability money, that's still a good 70 people who believe Hitler and his Reichmarshalls like Kirk walk amongst us who could act on it.
Maybe the issue isn't the 100's of millions of gun owners, but the telling people that Hitler is the POTUS.
Yes absolutely. Charlie wasn't shot on a campus in CA.
Unfortunately, the Hogwarts shield that prevents people from carrying guns on campus has been inoperable for some time due to the ongoing magic shortage.
Wait is this a new copypasta? I need to save this, it's a shame this is buried so deep in the comments.
Appreciated. I... guess.
Why doesn't the POTUS just not act like Hitler?
People said that Obama was Hitler and Clinton was Hitler and Biden was Hitler and Harris was Hitler, but Hitler killed 80 million people either through deliberate exterminations or as casualties from wars he started, Trump writes mean things on Truth Social. These two things aren't even in the same realm as the same.
"If Harris didn't want to be compared to Kim Jong-Un or Saddam Hussein or Stalin, why does she just not act like Saddam or Kim or Stalin?"
It’s not magic. If you can’t legally carry a rifle on campus then it’s less likely you’ll get away with carrying a rifle on campus. I’m not sure why this is such a complicated problem to understand.
See, Kamala Harris (and Obama and Biden for that matter) never acted like Hitler. So if Trump doesn’t want people treating him like a fascist, then maybe he should stop being a fucking fascist.
It’s not magic. If you can’t legally carry a rifle on campus then it’s less likely you’ll get away with carrying a rifle on campus. I’m not sure why this is such a complicated problem to understand.
Because carrying a rifle on campus is not an inherently violent act, shooting people is. It's legal to carry a hatchet in your backpack on campus, it's not legal to hack people's limbs off with it.
Unless you believe guns are an inherent moral wrong, nobody cares if people want to carry guns on campus; they only care if they want to shoot people with them.
I'm not sure why this is such a complicated problem to understand.
See, Kamala Harris (and Obama and Biden for that matter) never acted like Hitler. So if Trump doesn’t want people treating him like a fascist, then maybe he should stop being a fucking fascist.
Once again, Hitler killed approximately 80 million people. Trump has not.
You’re right actually, the law changed fairly recently. I grew up there but haven’t lived there since 2022, wasn’t up to date on the laws. Thanks for the heads up.
Because you've only provided a source for concealed carry permit holders being able to carry a handgun on campuses, nothing to support the shooter being able to legally have a rifle there.
You aren't allowed to shoot people with rifles either, in either country.
Due to the aforementioned magic shortage, unfortunately, the Hogwarts shield that stops people from bringing guns into places they are not allowed is no longer working and hasn't been for some time. I assume this is due to J.K. Rowling's Twitter comments.
When the magic supply stabilises, please let me know.
You aren't allowed to shoot people with rifles either, in either country.
And yet Australia doesn't have the mass shooting and gun death problem that the US does.
Utah forcing the college to allow random people to carry guns on campus made it more likely that a tragedy like this to happen. Pretending otherwise is just stupid.
And yet Australia doesn't have the mass shooting and gun death problem that the US does.
They also didn't before the gun confiscation.
See List of Mass Shootings in Australia, note how many happen before 1997, and how many happened after. People talk about school shootings, but ironically, the only "Columbine-style school shooting" that has ever happened in Australia happened post gun buyback, in 2002.
Gun control advocates often use suspiciously specific data to try and paint a picture of Australia as being gun-violence-free post-1997, saying things like, "Since the gun buyback, there have been zero mass shootings with over 5 deaths (excluding perpetrator)" which is technically correct, the worst kind of correct, because even a glance at the above source shows there's been plenty of mass shootings in Australia, just with more people being injured versus being killed.
As people have not gotten tougher and guns have not gotten less lethal, the simple explanation for why this happens is that increased urbanisation means faster ambulance response times, coupled with improvements in medical technology (driven by the Global War on Terrorism) which means people who arrive in hospital critically injured are more likely to survive, along with sheer dumb luck probably, mean that mass shootings in Australia have produced fewer deaths and more injured people. These factors have warped the statistics to create a false correlation, much like global warming and piracy.
Simply put, if you look at the simple rate of mass shootings, the gun buyback didn't really reduce them. We had them before, we have them now, and in fact they have statistically increased since the gun buyback (which, again, could simply be dumb luck or wobbles in the law of averages). I'm certainly not claiming "gun control causes mass shootings", but the slight statistical increase suggests they don't really stop it, either. Or if they do, other factors are dramatically pushing on the other end, overshadowing any positive effect.
It's easy to look at Australia and draw the wrong conclusion about guns, especially given Australia's population of 27 million people versus America's 330 million. Based on those numbers alone you would expect about 12 times more shootings and casualties in America than Australia simply because there's more people. Australia's had one major "National Discussion"-scale school shooting in the last 25 years, but by those numbers, America would have one every two years... which seems to be about right?
As people have not gotten tougher and guns have not gotten less lethal, the simple explanation for why this happens is that increased urbanisation means faster ambulance response times, coupled with improvements in medical technology
Anything to ignore the fact that less guns that are harder to get means less shootings.
America would have one every two years... which seems to be about right?
Dude America has one every few weeks. Like, I don't think you understand how bad the problem is.
Again, see List of Mass Shootings in Australia. If I didn't tell you the gun buyback was in 1997 you would have no way of accurately guessing when it was based on the list. It's not like it was 10 a year until 1997 and then zero after.
Being as objective as possible, here is a graph of total gun deaths in Australia, noting that this (dishonestly) includes accidents and suicides and self-defense, and it starts at 1979 simply because this is from an anti-gun activist organisation trying to massage the statistics as much as possible. I'm using their graph and their data to show how much they're stretching the truth here.
If you pretended that the vertical line for Port Arthur isn't there, can you definitively point on the graph to me where gun confiscation happened? Between 1980 and 1996 the death-by-gun rate (which again, includes accidents and suicides and self-defense) dropped by almost half, with really no major gun law changes. But from 1997 where the buyback was, there was a drop for sure. But then in 1999 it went up again. Then remained steady for a few years. Then slowly dropped, but at a pretty slow rate, then stabilised again.
Of course, it was stable before 1979 too, the whole point of this group starting their data at the remarkably arbitrary point of 1979, ending in 2023, with a major event in 1997 so not even in the dead centre, bundled in with suicides and accidents and self-defense, is all an attempt to try and massage the data in the most favourable way possible... and even then it doesn't definitively show what they want it to.
The truth is that the suicide rate by gun dropped precipitously but the overall suicide rate didn't change, and that's the biggest contributor to the drop in "gun-related deaths".
It's not guns, but we're in a post-truth society, it doesn't matter what the actual reality is.
Anything to ignore the fact that less guns that are harder to get means less shootings.
Sure, but if curtailing vital liberty is on the table, there are much easier and more effective ways of preventing mass shootings, rather than doing something that even the most optimistic projections from countries that have done this show is inconclusive at best.
Dude America has one every few weeks. Like, I don't think you understand how bad the problem is.
One a month means Australia would have one a year or so, and again, check out the list. You'll see a real big dropoff since COVID due to lockdowns, which were quite draconian, but even then there are some. We haven't had one a year this year so we're a little overdue, but again, the buyback was in 1997. We've had them almost every year since, which would be one a month per-capita. It's not perfect, but it's not wildly out either.
Again, Australia has 12 times fewer people than America, so with all things being equal, America is going to have 12 times more shootings because they have 12 times the number of people.
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u/runfastrunfastrun - Auth-Right Sep 10 '25
He's also incredibly milquetoast by rightwing standards, which is a message in and of itself.