Our MPP, Dawn Gallagher Murphy, was right to condemn the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing polemicist who revelled in face-to-face debate with those who disagreed with him. 

But the irony was not lost on me. 

Dawn Gallagher Murphy, who has chosen never, ever to debate an opponent on an election stage, posthumously praises Charlie Kirk who relished encounters with those who fervently disagreed with him.

To my mind, the late Charlie Kirk was racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and had weird views on the role of women in present-day America. Not really my cup of tea.

But, manifestly, none of that made him a fair target for assassination.

Nothing will Change

The real story of the murder of Charlie Kirk is that nothing is going to change

For me, Richard Warnica, writing in the Toronto Star last Friday, summed it up best:

If there’s one thing America has proved again and again, it’s that no shooting, no matter how deadly or high profile, ever changes much of anything. In the U.S., gun murders are part of the fabric, not just of school life and work life, but of political life too. Kirk himself knew that. He considered gun deaths part of the grand American bargain. “I think it’s worth it,” he said in 2023. “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.”

There is absolutely no way the Second Amendment is going to be removed from the US Constitution.

Flintlocks and Muskets

But could the Amendment itself be amended to limit the right to bear arms to those that were current in 1776?

You know…  give the gun worshippers the right to buy flintlocks and muskets that were used in the American Revolution. The kind of weapons that take forever to load and are not too accurate. And go off with a spark and a puff of smoke.

That would, at least, be a step forward.

Alas, it ain't gonna happen.

Dysfunctional

We all know the United States is a completely dysfunctional country. Institutionally unable and unwilling to enact the changes that would make its citizens safer.

Decades ago, when I was an MP in the UK, I voted for a complete ban on handguns following the tragedy at Dunblane in Scotland where elementary school children were killed by a lunatic with a love of guns.

So you can ban guns if you want to.

But not in America.

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Charlie Kirk’s Death won’t change a thing.

by Richard Warnica (Toronto Star)

Charlie Kirk, one of the most influential organizers and activists in American right-wing politics, was shot and killed Wednesday while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University, in Orem, Utah. I probably didn’t need to tell you that. If you’re reading this, you likely know the details already: of the shooting and the backlash; of the manhunt (such as it was. The police didn’t catch the shooter. His dad turned him in); and the fiery and largely pointless online debates about who has and has not condemned whom with enough clarity and zeal.

As I typed this Friday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump had just finished telling Fox News that authorities had a suspect in custody. As I finished the piece, that suspect was identified as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah resident. Police apparently found both fired and unfired bullets tied to Robinson’s gun engraved with messages that all seemed less ideological than just deeply online: “Hey fascist! Catch!”; “If you read this, you are gay LMAO;” and, in a reference to an obscure meme, “Notices Bulges, OwO.”

By the time you read this, we may know more about Robinson’s background and motivations. But based on past experience, I don’t expect those details, no matter what they reveal, to change much about the debate over Kirk’s killing.

If there’s one thing America has proved again and again, it’s that no shooting, no matter how deadly or high profile, ever changes much of anything. In the U.S., gun murders are part of the fabric, not just of school life and work life, but of political life too. Kirk himself knew that. He considered gun deaths part of the grand American bargain. “I think it’s worth it,” he said in 2023. “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.”

Nothing changed in America after a depressed student murdered 32 classmates at Virginia Tech university in 2007. Nothing changed after 26 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary. Nothing changed after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel Methodist Church. Nothing changed after James T. Hodgkinson shot up a Congressional baseball practice. Nothing changed after Vance Boelter murdered Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband this summer.

Trump held a parade the day Hortman died. I was there. He didn’t even mention her name.

So no, I don’t think Kirk’s murder will be an inflection point in American history. I don’t think it will lead to any actual changes, at least not the kind that would result in fewer gun deaths or less violence in America. I was in Milwaukee, at the Republican National Convention, days after Trump himself was shot and nearly killed at a rally in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2024. I remember all the columns and punditry about how everything had changed, how he had changed, how the race had changed, how politics must change.

Nothing changed. Two weeks later, it was barely a story.