Was Charlie Kirk, to some degree, a victim of his own ideology? When a person preaches extreme gun rights that allow the absolute proliferation of guns that we currently have in the United States, and when a person routinely uses hate speech to denigrate groups of people as Kirk did, the outcome may not be all that surprising.

I’m not saying Kirk had it coming or was asking for it. Nothing of the sort. His murder was senseless and unnecessary, and the person responsible needs to be held to account. Political violence is never justified. Got it? Okay…read on.

What I’m saying is that there is a direct line between free and easy access to firearms and higher gun deaths. This is a fact. There is also verifiable evidence that hate speech leads to more violence. And sometimes it comes back to bite proponents of gun rights and hate speech in the butt.

Charlie Kirk was engaged and committed to an ideology that fosters and promotes violence. I’m sure he never thought he would become a victim of his own ideology, but that appears to be the case.

Let me break the evidence down to support this idea. Again, please understand, this connection does not mean that I am arguing that Kirk deserved to die in the prime of his life, leaving a wife and two children behind. That is tragic on a visceral human level. However, speech, as free as we want it to be in the United States, sometimes comes with consequences, many times consequences we can’t predict.

Gun Rights

Kirk repeatedly opposed restrictions on firearms and portrayed gun ownership as central to liberty. For instance, he constantly praised “constitutional carry laws” and no permits for concealed carry. He criticized red flag laws and background check expansions, arguing they infringe on Second Amendment rights. He hosted Turning Point USA events where gun rights groups were prominent partners. For Kirk, the more guns in society, the better.

Kirk was killed by a sniper using a firearm—an act made possible in part by the ease of acquiring high-powered weapons in the United States. The policies he championed (weakening background checks, opposing restrictions) contribute to the environment that made such violence possible.

Kirk said in his speeches that there is an acceptable level of gun violence that we must tolerate:

“You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am — 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. That is a prudent deal.” (Media Matters for America)

Kirk expressly accepts that some number of gun deaths is an acceptable cost of maintaining broad gun rights. Oh, the sad irony. But please, don’t make Charlie into a martyr. This could have been avoided. We could have, and should have had stricter gun laws a long time ago, you know, after Sandy Hook.

We know that the abundance of guns in the culture results in more gun violence. This has been substantiated time after time in public health research, which shows states with fewer gun restrictions experience higher rates of gun deaths. (Harvard Injury Control Research Center, RAND Gun Policy in America project).

Charlie Kirk helped promote a political culture that normalized widespread access to firearms, and that culture ultimately enabled the conditions of his assassination. That ideology has consequences.

Hate Speech & Polarization

Charlie Kirk has made hateful speech a part of his standard stump speech. He was good at it. He was particularly polarizing regarding immigration. He said during his online show in December 2023:

“We have way too many legal immigrants coming into this country, too. 1.5 to 1.6 million legal people coming – Ilhan Omar came in legally and she hates the country. She’s a sleeper cell infiltrator of the United States representing Congress. She hates the country. She hates the west. She should be deported back to where she came from, Somalia.” (Media Matters for America)

He frequently used inflammatory language against political opponents, immigrants, and marginalized groups. Examples include calling LGBTQ+ activism “grooming,” portraying immigrants as “invaders,” and framing Democrats as “enemies of America.” His platform, TPUSA, often amplified culture-war framing designed to provoke outrage and demonize opponents.

During another episode of his podcast, Kirk made these comments about the gay community:

“By the way, the buried lead of this is that 60 percent of this school board is LGBT, is gay. The question is, do Christians run for school boards as much as the LGBT community does? No. As I said yesterday, groomers can’t reproduce, so instead they recruit. So, they go serve on school boards. And they go do drag queens. And they do all this other sort of disgusting nauseating stuff.”

Another time, he went on to say,

“This is the thing that people have to realize about the alphabet mafia. … Instead, it’s the opposite. The opposite is that gay marriage happens and we’re talking about gay stuff more than any other time. Why? Because they are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”

Kirk was using metaphorical and provocative language—“groomers,” “corrupt your children”—commonly considered harmful or demonizing rhetoric, especially by those who are targeted.

Evidence shows once again that the more polarizing hate speech there is in a culture, the higher the level of political violence. Research shows that dehumanizing speech by leaders correlates with increased political violence. By contributing to the normalization of such rhetoric, Kirk helped sustain a climate of political polarization in which enemies are seen as existential threats. In such an environment, retaliatory violence—whether from the right or left—becomes more likely.

Here Is The Evidence

Consider this study, which was released in 2020 by James Piazza, who is a Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of research and teaching specialization include Terrorism, Counterterrorism, Political Violence, Intrastate Conflict, and the politics of the Middle East and the Islamic World.

Piazza used statistical data on domestic terrorist incidents from the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, and major political party figures’ use of hate speech in about 150 countries between 2000 and 2017. His goal was to determine the relationship between politicians using hate speech and the number of domestic terror attacks the country experienced the following year.

What Piazza found was clear: Domestic terrorism was much more frequent in countries where politicians used hate speech “often” or “extremely often.” Such countries, including Iraq, Russia, Turkey, and Sudan, experienced an average of 107.9 domestic terrorist attacks during that period.

The evidence also showed that domestic terror attacks began to rise in 2016 with the advent of Donald Trump’s candidacy and first term. The attacks have stayed high ever since. (See chart below)

The truth is that Kirk’s hate speech not only targeted others but also fed the broader cycle of hostility and extremism that rebounded against him. He helped inflame the climate of vitriol and hostility. He was killed in a political assassination, an ultimate form of hostile polarization.

Charlie Kirk didn’t deserve to die, but he can be seen as a victim of his own ideology because he vigorously promoted policies that expanded access to firearms, facilitating the very weapons used in his assassination, and engaged in hate speech that deepened a culture of polarization and hostility, conditions that allow political violence to thrive.

Historical Precedent

Leaders in history who normalize violence often become vulnerable to it themselves. In Weimar Germany, for instance, far-right groups that used political assassinations later saw their own leaders assassinated. Right-wing paramilitaries and nationalist politicians regularly used dehumanizing rhetoric about socialists, Jews, and liberals. Political assassinations, such as the foreign minister Walther Rathenau in 1922, were justified as “patriotic.”

In Latin America, politicians who endorsed armed militias sometimes later became victims of the same cycles of violence. Colombian Liberal and Conservative leaders used incendiary language to frame each other as existential threats. Politicians armed militias and justified attacks against rivals, which ultimately came back on themselves.

Here in the United States in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy and allies used accusatory rhetoric, calling opponents “traitors,” “enemies within,” to purge political rivals. The paradox emerged when the atmosphere of fear and suspicion eventually turned on McCarthy himself. By 1954, televised hearings exposed his reckless charges, and the Senate censured him.

Leaders who unleash campaigns of demonization often fall prey to the same culture of suspicion they encourage. Kirk’s case fits this tragic pattern: promoting extremism and gun culture can create an ecosystem that doesn’t discriminate in who it ultimately harms.

Political scientists worry that leaders normalizing violent or hateful rhetoric about immigrants, LGBTQ people, or other opponents may face retaliatory or indiscriminate violence in the climate they helped fuel — as Kirk’s case now illustrates.

Playing With Fire

The consistent and predictable pattern is that when political leaders normalize hate speech or violence, they lose control over its trajectory. Letting the genie out of the bottle has dire consequences. The culture of hostility they help create doesn’t distinguish between the “enemy” and the “ally.” In that sense, Charlie Kirk’s death fits into a long line of historical tragedies where leaders became victims of the very political violence they helped to legitimize.

It does not justify the assassination of Kirk in any way. However, in today’s heated rhetoric, which has intensified in the aftermath of this recent tragedy, leaders need to understand that they are playing with fire. The connection between their words, ideas, and actions with extreme violence is easily understood. Innocent people are being attacked, and others may get in the way of the line of fire.

If political leaders don’t change their overheated rhetoric, I’m afraid many more unnecessary and tragic deaths are going to occur. It is time for leaders to understand the consequences of both their ideology and their rhetoric and take steps to back away from the precipice of violence by neutralizing hate speech, stopping the demonization of opponents, and enacting evidence-based solutions to curb gun violence in this country.

The solution is actually not that difficult…just “shut up!”