One of the best at conducting open discussions on campuses died today, (Sept 10, 2025). He was assassinated while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University, near Salt Lake City, as part of the American Comeback Tour, hosted by the university’s Turning Point USA chapter. A shot rang out and Charlie’s artery burst instantly! Charlie Kirk’s life was threatened numerous times, resulting in almost no one being held responsible; this left the door wide open for this event!
It has become so normal for politicians to threaten anyone they don’t agree with; when asked what they meant, they tend to say it was just an expression. A former head of the FBI joked about “86ing” Donald Trump. A comedian carried a bloody, severed head, a pop artist fantasized how she would kill Trump if she got the chance, an Academy award-winning actor threaten to kill Trump himself, and what followed were two attempts on his life.
When is it too much?! Don’t we need to stem this growing trend? The conflation of disagreement and hatred has to be called out! Charlie has been called a ‘hater’ by a national news anchor due to his differing opinions, and this after his death! Charlie Kirk was a non-violent Christian, that bent over backwards to be respectful to even his most ardent enemy! A hater, he was not! What he was, was a debater! He has spoken respectfully with thousands of angry students, always keeping his ‘Charlie Kirk decorum’. He may fervently disagree, but never has he threatened anyone!
We used to have a clear ‘line in the sand’ that said threats were prosecutable. It is paramount to protect free speech, but we need bright red guardrails! You can go all the way, right up to ‘defamation’ and be safe, inside the ‘womb of free speech’, but any threat to wellbeing and I mean way short of murder, should be prosecutable!
“Sticks and stones may break my bones”, but words of physical threat should land you in a jail cell! That is not free speech. Death threats have become so ordinary that they are now invited on all media. News anchors often smirk at social media threats and even egg them on! The news anchors and editors should be prosecutable for their flagrant abuse of that ‘line in the sand’ between ugly remarks and physical threat.
I don’t care if you are a 99-year-old grandmother or a 100-year-old preacher, if you suggest harming anyone you should be arrested and prosecuted according to the degree of the threat. We should not be making allowances for physical threats against celebrities. No one has the right to threaten the life or wellbeing of another.
Why are there so many shootings? Because they are accepted as a normal condition. Most of the shooters have declared their intent to carry out their mass murder event publicly, and their free speech rights let them load up, and execute! If the guardrails were up, those shootings would have never occurred.
We have reset ‘normal’ so a raving lunatic is now allowed to walk the streets right up until they kill someone, and in some states they are even let out after committing the crime! We have allowed our country to become hooked on drugs, even in my small community, most of the convenient stores sell small cigars (expensively priced singles) bought to slit and insert drugs. If I am in a store for ten minutes, someone comes in to buy one!
My sleepy little cul-de-sac has a certifiable looney placing trash along his front lawn at the road to ‘keep the dogs out’. I live across the street and have been there for thirty years and never had a dog poop in my yard! The other next door neighbor has a son that screams in the night. The other sane neighbor asked him why he does that, and he said, “Because I’m mad at the universe!”. Another neighbor across the street has no trash pickup and we can only assume her basement is out of control! She also suffers from addictions.
This is the new norm. When we moved in just over thirty years ago, all we had were sane neighbors, some friendly and some not, but all of them were sane. The drugs cause paranoia, social media allows the most abnormal to find ‘community’ and focuses on the ‘I, me, me, mine’ philosophy. And as ‘normal’ slips further away we all just say, oh well, times are changing and we just have to accept that. Do we?
What we now know about Charlie Kirk's assassin... Straight A student, no known drug use, practicing Christian in the Church of the Later Day Saints, grew up in Republican family who support Trump, registered to vote but no party affiliation himself, believed “both political sides were contributing to a country being in a worse place and not improving the world,”. Family and friends report that shooter expressed his disdain for Charlie Kirk, but never made any threats. the only free speech that motived this killing was that of Charlie Kirk himself. As for Kirk himself, who you have "a lot of love and respect for", often quoted Bible verse Leviticus 20:13, which endorses the execution of homosexuals, which he said "serves as “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” So you 'love and respect" someone whose speech encourages other to do violence against gays.
Times are changing as far as technology goes but people have not. So we pretty much have to accept the fact that crime of all types is here to stay. The Egyptians, Romans, Greeks all couldn't stop crime and they had some horrible punishments. In the US we punish crime with jail time. According to Google the median annual cost to keep a person in jail is $65,000 a year. Now that's a crime.