Was Charlie Kirk’s Death a Tragedy or a Political Weapon?

I was scrolling through the news last night when the headline froze me: Charlie Kirk shot dead at Utah Valley University. I stopped breathing for a moment. No matter what you think of the man—and I thought plenty—seeing another life stolen by a bullet felt like a punch to the gut.

Three reflex reactions usually follow moments like this, and all three are poison. First, the whisper that he somehow “had it coming.” Second, the instant sanctification of the victim as if death rewrote their past. Third, the shameless politicisation, where blood is turned into ammunition. All three are wrong. All three are cowardice dressed as certainty.

The murder of Charlie Kirk is indefensible. Period. Violence is the great eraser of democracy. A man should never die for speaking in a lecture hall. If that principle falls, then none of us—left, right, or centre—can ever feel safe debating ideas again. The echo of gunfire in a public forum is the sound of democracy being strangled.

And yet, here’s the part most people won’t say out loud: Charlie Kirk wasn’t a saint. He was a deeply divisive figure, the founder of Turning Point USA, a movement that cultivated a love affair with guns and thrived on scapegoating. His rhetoric, often sharp as broken glass, fanned the flames of the very cultural violence America now drowns in. Ignoring this truth, just because he was killed, is not respect—it’s manipulation.

What sickens me most is watching how quickly political operatives rushed to hijack his death. Trump wasted no time blaming the “radical left.” Elon Musk dubbed Democrats “the party of assassins.” These aren’t condolences—they’re gasoline on a fire already raging. When grief is weaponised, truth is murdered twice.

So where does that leave us? With a double responsibility. To condemn his killing with full voice, and at the same time, to resist the pressure to erase the sharp edges of his life. Kirk deserves human dignity in death, but not hagiography. The young people he influenced, the hatred he sometimes unleashed, the policies he defended—they remain part of his story. Memory must be honest or it is propaganda.

The larger tragedy here isn’t only Kirk’s murder. It’s the America where classrooms practise lockdown drills like fire drills, where public spaces feel like minefields, and where every gunshot becomes another argument about freedom instead of a wake-up call about survival. That’s not freedom—it’s resignation.

I want you to sit with this uncomfortable truth: we can mourn a man’s death and still interrogate the life he lived. We can reject violence without silencing criticism. That tension is not hypocrisy—it’s the price of honesty in a democracy.

Because if we trade truth for the comfort of sanctification, we’ve already lost more than one life. We’ve lost our ability to see clearly.

And without clarity, what chance do we have of breaking this cycle of gunfire and grief?