Shooting tears a new rift in the United States

Step back from partisan politics for just a moment and consider a single undeniable fact.

No one — no one — deserves to be shot, let alone killed, for their political beliefs or, for that matter, for their words.

Can they be prosecuted, if their language descends into hate speech? Absolutely. Can they be publicly reviled, and lose their jobs if their employers feel that their actions cast the employers in a bad light? Yes, they can.

American right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a public event at Utah Valley University Wednesday. He was, at the very least, a controversial figure, with oft-divisive opinions on race, gender and sexuality which have generated huge backlash.

Some of those opinions can certainly make you ponder, such as Kirk’s April 2023 argument about gun deaths in the U.S. that April 5, 2023: “I think it’s worth it. 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.”

But none of those opinions justifies his assassination.

Perhaps more frightening than the fact that a public figure has been shot to death, though, is the response to his shooting.

Some on the left have clearly gloried in Kirk’s death. That may be fleetingly understandable as a knee-jerk reaction from those who have felt a personal sting from Kirk’s past comments, but it’s also ghoulish, unacceptable and brutally offensive. Kirk was a human being with a young family.

On the right, even though (at the time of the writing of this editorial) the shooter has not been arrested, politicians were quick to announce the attack was due to leftists and Democrats.

Republican figures — including at least one congressman — have called for the suspension of parts of the American constitution, like the right to free speech (a right Kirk himself defended constantly). Others have even called for the blanket arrest or expulsion of up to 10 per cent of Democrats, a notion so bizarre it’s hard to believe it could come from an actual public figure.

Neither of those reactions, left or right, will be forgotten, even if the arrest and conviction of Kirk’s killer shows a far different picture than the very public off-the-cuff early reactions to the event.

At this point, no one seems satisfied to wait for professionals to provide their crime-scene analysis and perform their full investigations, nor, frankly, to be willing to accept that analysis when it finally arrives.

America, it seems, seeks to separate truth from fiction along political lines, rather than empirical ones.

It is hard not to think that we are on the verge of watching a once great nation tear itself apart, a nation that is poised to become the victim of politicians that have used American rage and frustration to feather their own political nests.

It is, for countries like Canada, an object lesson in what does not belong in governance. We should simply decide that we’re not going to go there.

But there are also small signs of hope.

One came from Americans around the same age as the Utah college crowd that witnessed Kirk’s shooting.

The Young Democrats of Connecticut and the Connecticut Young Republicans issued a joint statement Wednesday, saying, “What happened at Utah Valley University this afternoon is unacceptable. We reject all forms of political violence. There is no place in our country for such acts, regardless of political disagreements.”

For all the grownups in the room, that’s how it’s done.