What We’re Not Talking About

On Sept. 10, two young American males brought guns to campuses and opened fire. 

One, perched atop a Utah Valley University roof with a hunting rifle, shot and killed Charlie Kirk, a high-profile extreme right-wing activist. His death has launched an outpouring of grief among public figures, countless speeches and essays lamenting the loss of civility and free speech. There were also simultaneous demands for the cooling of violent “left-wing rhetoric” and vows for revenge from the Trump administration against supposed leftist terrorist organizations, despite no evidence of any such group’s involvement. The American flag was lowered across the country by order of the president, who also plans to bestow Kirk with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

The other shooter, a 16 year old with a revolver in Colorado, shot, reloaded and shot again at fellow Evergreen High School students, hitting two before turning the weapon on himself and taking his own life. One of the injured is stable, while the other remains in critical condition. This brings the number of school shootings to 11 in 2025, a year that’s seen 170 children killed by guns, a gutting number that, despite gun deaths being the leading killer of children in the U.S., has not launched much of anything.

Lest we get too caught up in Kirk’s hagiography as many media outlets rush to sanitize his life’s work of openly upholding white supremacy and patriarchy, and actively lobbying to strip the civil rights and safety from marginalized people, let’s remember that his legacy touches gun violence, too. A proponent of the proliferation of firearms, Kirk said, “I think it’s worth it 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.” 

Utah’s permissive gun laws, along with Kirk’s and 170 children’s deaths this year, are part of that deal. And following the recent passage of HB 128, the university where Kirk was shot is now an open carry campus — previously a firearm would have to be concealed while one strolled the quad. 

But in the wake of Kirk’s death, talking about the reality and impact of the “controversial” views he put forth — or draping a flag over them — has become a litmus test, with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah and MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd fired for frankly calling out — or quoting — Kirk’s racist, misogynist public declarations. Universities, a number of which have bent the knee to the Trump administration for fear of crackdowns and funding loss, have also fired and suspended professors for critical comments. Former Fox News contributor and now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instructed staff to root out military members or “Department of War” civilian staff for mocking — or not sympathizing — with Kirk’s assassination for punishment, despite Kirk having been a civilian outside chain of command. He made a similar callout on social media. 

Rather than talking about gun violence, a number of media outlets, local and national, have followed obediently, accepting the framing of the shooting as left-wing violence and decrying Democratic rhetoric, despite the depth and breadth of white supremacist, anti-LBGTQ+, antisemitic and misogynist dog whistles coming from the White House and its surrogates for years, Kirk and his peers among those blowing hardest. To see pundits calling for unity and civil discussion without acknowledging the division Kirk and those lashing out on his behalf sowed is galling.

The Wall Street Journal made the shameful call to spread the then unconfirmed and later debunked theory that engraving on the bullet casings reflected “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” The legacy newspaper’s anemic editor’s note indicating an absence of such evidence was not enough to keep the story and lurid versions of it from being scooped up by outlets like Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, The Daily Caller, Daily Wire, RedState, The Federalist, Washington Times, Fox & Friends, The Megyn Kelly Show and Newsmax, to say nothing of its swift spread across social media. 

Trans people are a small, vulnerable population already in the crosshairs of so many hate groups and four times more likely to be victims of violence than cisgender people, despite this manufactured panic. According to the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Association Center, 96 percent of mass shooters are cisgender men. Adding to the vitriol and the whipping up of violence against trans people is indefensible. 

Part of the problem is how media outlets reported on Kirk when he was alive. Presenting his bigoted and unfounded positions as worthy of debate was a mistake outlets, politicians and pundits seem eager to perpetuate, possibly because it offers a “both sides” illusion of parity. Possibly because he showed up in a suit and tie and spoke with the tenor, if not the spirit, of rationality. A digestible vocabulary, a TV meteorologist’s lack of accent, a clean-shaven white face and a calm tone of voice are sadly and demonstrably enough to make the sacrificing of Americans to gun violence an idea to be considered in mainstream discussions. 

Still, we don’t want to speak ill of the dead, even if that includes their own words. Not when it’s politically expedient to drive a narrative with convenient heroes and villains to eat up airtime that might otherwise have been filled with, say, the Epstein files.

These are the debates pundits, columnists and journalists are wasting time on instead of considering the effective gun control countries like Australia and Japan have taken to curb gun deaths and mass shootings, or the high rates of firearm-related deaths in states with lax gun laws.

We could instead speak of the school shootings and gun deaths we’re told not to politicize with calls for protest and legal reform, or any action beyond thoughts and prayers — the deaths that Kirk felt were “a cost,” that he could have pushed to prevent and of which he is now one. It’s the dead we don’t speak of at all that should trouble us most.

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.

This article appears in Burger Week 2025.