"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 quote from Charlie Kirk, a political commentator who was shot and killed on Wednesday, Sept. 10, at Utah State University during a speaking engagement. 

I couldn’t decide what to write about for my first column. Jayden, editor-in-chief of The Slate, wrote in her most recent "Your World Today" about "the beginning of the end" and how it feels to be a senior. She captured my feelings, and it felt repetitive to write a piece saying the same.

However, with the death of Kirk earlier this week, there has been a lot on my mind.

People around the country are mourning Kirk and praising him as a hero, a patriot who lost his life for speaking the truth.

For me, when I look at Kirk and the person he was, I don’t feel the same feelings of grief. 

This is the man who not only compared abortion to the holocaust but said that it was worse. This is the man who said that black women, like Michelle Obama, "do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously" without affirmative action. 

This is a man who peddled racial stereotypes, hate speech and conspiracy theories to his audience. For someone who defended guns above human life, his death couldn’t be more ironic. 

I am not advocating for political violence. His death was unnecessary and cruel. I feel empathy for his family and the people he left behind. No one should meet this kind of end.

What makes my skin crawl is when the reactions to Kirk’s death are compared to other gun violence tragedies. Alex Jones, long-time conspiracy theorist, mourned Kirk’s death publicly on X by tweeting, “The left is now celebrating Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder. We are all Charlie Kirk now …,” with a photo of himself crying. 

After the tragic Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, 20 children and six adults lost their lives. What did Jones say after this tragedy? He called the relatives of the deceased “crisis actors” and claimed that none of the deceased had actually lost their lives. 

This is just one of the reprehensible ideas pushed by Jones over the years. But now that an ally has passed, it’s a tragedy, and the 26 people who lost their lives in that school shooting, and the hundreds since, are given no mercy. What makes one death more tragic than another?

According to CNN, there have been 47 school shootings this year, as of Sept. 10. As school shootings have become more and more common, activists and survivors have been pushing for stricter gun control. 

It’s ironic that a man who said that gun deaths were worth it to keep the Second Amendment lost his life in this way. 

It’s tragic. It’s brutal. It’s completely unnecessary. That’s how I view Kirk’s death. At the same time, it was entirely preventable. 

I’m not a political strategist. I don’t know what the solution is. But one would think that after the rising cases of gun violence over the last several decades in this country, the people in charge would take steps to prevent tragedies like this. 

We are a divided country, now more than ever. Underneath all of the political bullshit, at the end of the day, we are all human. Will we ever unite to make a change? How many more innocent people have to die for something to give? 

As I said earlier, I do not condone political violence. But I know that the future of this country is bleak unless we do something about it. 

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