the Empathy List #155: Empathy for him, too?

Reckoning with the horrible symmetry of Charlie Kirk, the evil of gun violence, and the love of God.

Hi friends, Liz here.

You know what happened. We’re all talking about it and thinking about it and we’re all wondering who’s next. Charlie Kirk, probably the most polarizing political pundit of my generation, the millennials, was shot and died on stage while answering a question about gun violence.

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Right now, we don’t need novels, we have the news. [sob]

Extremely online authors this week kept saying, no editor would let this stream of events pass for a believable plot, no way, no how.

Yet, apparently, we now live within a violent, virulent surreal dystopia without hard facts or safe places.

(I told my husband this week, Trump is one thing, but Trump and AI? I cannot handle their combined chaos, not at the same time. Together, they stretch my brain to its limits.)

In one week, we could choose to watch a man shot, or we could see the faces of children as they ran from an active shooter. All this through a tiny flashlight the size of our palm, one that contains so much of ourselves and yet remains alien to us, revolving with endless bad news and rage, which may or may not originate within a human mind or heart. (Possibly it’s only bots rage-hallucinating together. SIGH)

In America right now, the threat of violence is palpable. The political anger has moved beyond screens and into our real lives, disrupting our ordinary living with abrupt endings and sundered bodies, blood and tears and screams and an entire crowd dropping like a bomb has detonated.

My children also duck—beneath their desks and for practice, just in case a man storms into their Denver Public School with a murderous death wish. Since I live in Aurora, a short 30-45 minute commute from the school where yet another shooting occurred last week, this unreality does not feel so unreal as the others.

(Video Credit: The Knotted Gun, a Nonviolence Art Project)

Every American mother I know despises American gun policy, policy supported (supposedly) by the second amendment, a cost that our children must pay for the sake of corporate lobbyists, gun companies, and violent offenders (because, btw, I know that the hunters among us understand the difference between an AR and a hunting weapon, so don’t bullshit us in the comments. The guns active shooters use are meant for war.)

Some of us parents are so tired and afraid that we have dis-enrolled our children in favor of home learning, an extremely imperfect solution since public executions do not just happen at school, but also in movie theaters, concerts, night clubs, churches, grocery stories, parks, and any public venue where bodies congregate.

Within driving distance of my home, I can count out two hands worth of public gun violence, most at local schools, some at places I frequent, like the Aurora movie theater where I watched Freakier Friday with my daughter last week, sharing a bucket of popcorn and a pint of Coke Zero. In 2012, a shooter entered that same theater lobby, volleying bullets. These acts of public gun violence happen regularly in my neighborhood and community, and frankly, it’s a miracle I or my children haven’t had to meet the eyes of a gunman across a room.

At the moment, I refuse to look up the statistics for gun violence in my state, but I know off the top of my head that hundreds of lives have been lost. In Canada, according to one social media poster this week, eleven people have died of school-related gun violence—ever. That number includes Canada’s entire history of gun violence. [Fact check me, if you want—I hope I’m wrong and that less people have died everywhere.]

By the way, public shootings are not the majority of gun deaths, either. Self-inflicted or accidental shootings occur daily, hourly even, to the tune of thousands per year in the U.S., ending more Americans than traffic accidents or terrorist attacks. Guns kill more people than fentanyl.

Guns are ubiquitous in the United States, and we Americans don’t seem to give a damn about public safety, only personal safety, and so we won’t legislate their use enough to keep kids safe at school.

No one can agree about how to move forward. In fact, there seems to be a major disconnect between those of us who experience these events on the ground and those who legislate. For some reason, we cannot, will not institute public safety in America, despite the high death toll.

Even worse, those of us who must prepare our children to face this inevitable grief and terror at school, those of us who are educators or who love educators, those of us who know and care about children, we cannot even convince those closest to our kids to change their minds about this one issue.

Within my family (and many others), our kids’s grandparents will cast a vote that supports gun rights, rather voting for the safety of their grandchildren.

Here’s where we return to the public murder of the American far right pundit and devout Christian, Charlie Kirk. He proclaimed the name of Christ, yes, a fact that many church people have taken to social media to exclaim. They believe this makes Kirk a martyr.

However, I’d like to offer a counterpoint. Consider his 2023 statement,

“It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment…”

That is a shattering, jaw-dropping statement.

What exactly is worth it, i.e. “some gun deaths every single year”? What is gained by reading the second amendment as an unbreakable, unalterable promise to gun owners that America will barely legislate their gun ownership? What is gained by owning a gun? Is it safety? Security? Power? Masculinity?

Is there any other way we can cultivate these values without trading children for theoretical “rights”?

Lord, have mercy.

But Charlie Kirk kept talking. Here’s the full quote:

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. [Emphasis mine]

Kirk said this at a conference hosted by Turning Point USA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group, on 5 April 2023. He made this statement to an audience of faith leaders who, it seems, agreed with him, at least enough to pay to hear his words live.

Here Kirk is asserting that the second amendment is the way we protect what God has given us, all those other human rights, and if you don’t have violent means to protect your humanity, you cannot be safe. The opportunity to enact violence on others is what provides you holding the gun with safety.

At the heart of Charlie Kirk theology, gun theology, is the fear of an enemy. That enemy will try to take what God has given you, to rip away what is yours. They can, in fact, overpower and overrule God.

Kirk implies that God cannot or will not protect you. Your safety isn’t guaranteed—unless you’re willing to take your safety by force. Then you can keep yourself and your people safe. Then you can defy death, disagreement, fear, and insecurity. By means of a gun, you will take power and authority by force. You can stop evil before it reaches your door—God won’t act, but with a gun, you can act.

Either God is impotent, or worse, God is the bully with the gun. God is MAGA in a cutoff flannel with an AR-15 balanced over God’s muscled white shoulder. God in their image.

…except God doesn’t carry. And that’s not what God is like, according to centuries of Christian tradition and according to the Bible itself.

That’s not what God is like.

The irony of Kirk’s tragic death—which I wish had never happened and hope/pray will not be repeated—is that he misses the actual Jesus as Jesus appears in the New Testament, and Kirk, in fact, seems to prove Jesus’s words about the futility of violence.

As Roman soldiers approach Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, themselves agents of political assassination, Peter draws a sword on his political enemy, slashing at the ear of a Jewish collaborator. Peter’s anger slashes and flashes, the solider yelps, and then blood runs, skin hangs, exposing a gaping wound.

In response to Peter’s violence—violence committed on Jesus’s behalf to protect the teacher—Jesus rebukes Peter:

Put away your sword! Don’t you know my power? How many companies of angels I could call down upon these few men to battle on my behalf? No, I choose this path because those who live by the sword will also die by the sword. (Here I’ve paraphrased Matthew 26:52)

That single phrase—“Those who live by the sword will die by the sword”—has swum in my mind all week as I’ve considered the assassination of Kirk.

I do not believe my feelings are vengeful, yet I wonder at the strange irony. In a moment when Kirk is on stage, defending the second amendment, he receives a bullet in the neck. He and his cronies excused gun violence for the sake of owning guns themselves, and then his own end arrived through the butt of a barrel.

I hate that Charlie Kirk died like this. What a tragedy. No one should die like that. No one should watch your husband or father die like that.

Also, I cannot ignore the symmetry of the man’s teaching and his death. Kirk lived by the sword and died by the sword, proving the words of Jesus.

To be honest, writing those words about Kirk’s death—in a way condemning him— makes me deeply uncomfortable. I am a woman who believes devoutly that people can change. And I believe that Jesus is different precisely because he loved his enemies, he did good and offered kindness to those who hated him, and he prayed for those who persecuted him. Those who betrayed him, exploited him, and misunderstood him, he called us family.

Christians are called to this same reconciling work as Jesus did.

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But we must not be fooled believing evil has no consequences.

Charlie Kirk, a man who advocated that death by guns was unfortunate but a reasonable trade for the sake of gun owners everywhere, died by a bullet.

Every act of gun violence is evil—including Kirk’s death. Also evil: allowing violence to persist when you could do something to stop it. By not advocating for change in our gun policy, Kirk planted the seeds of his own death. His inaction was evil.¹

That is tragic.

Let us hold this tension—the evil that Kirk perpetuated, and the evil done to him—and let us be those who love our enemies in response. Yes, even him. He, too, is worthy of the love of God, and he, too, will have it if he repents. That’s in God’s hands now.

Thanks for reading, my friends.

Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant

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On a (slightly) lighter note, I enjoyed this curation by Artspace, featuring seven works of contemporary art that take a stance on gun violence.

Also for those who want to JUST DO SOMETHING, I recommend volunteering and/or donating to my friend Mike Martin’s organization, Raw Tools.

1. Today, I’m not writing about Kirk’s other extremely public sins, like his advocacy that brimmed with overt racism, white supremacy, ableism, and misogyny. After I drafted this email, I heard the news of two black men in Mississippi who police found hung in trees over the past couple of days. This, too, I’d argue, is the rotten fruit of Kirk’s theology. Please pray for these men and their families, and black friends, please stay safe.