11/09/2025
“Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.”
- Charlie Kirk
“I think it’s worth it 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. It is rational.”
- Charlie Kirk
“I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage”
- Charlie Kirk
“The Democrat Party supports everything that God hates… I hope you give a Sunday sermon and talk about how the Democrat Party believes everything that God hates.”
- Charlie Kirk
I’ll be honest…
I was never a fan of Charlie Kirk or the content he shared.
His words often felt like they were calling for division and, at times, for violence. He used religious framing, fear, and dramatic rhetoric to galvanize some of his audience
And yet - when it comes to death - politics and ideology fall away.
Because every life is bigger than its public persona.
Every person is a spouse, a child, a parent, a friend.
Every death by violence is a heartbreak that ripples outward, touching families, communities, and even those who once stood in opposition.
It’s not easy to hold empathy for someone who dismissed empathy as weakness.
But that’s the work of our shared humanity - to resist dismissal, to refuse the lure of dehumanization, and instead to remember that we are all fragile, finite, and bound together in loss.
What I return to is this…
Gun violence continues to devastate lives, regardless of ideology. Today it was more children at a school.
Tomorrow it will be someone else’s neighbor, someone else’s child, someone else’s whole world.
The cycle doesn’t pause for politics.
Empathy is not weakness. It’s not a “New Age invention.”
It is the thread that binds us, the force that might one day heal us. And even when it feels impossible, even across the widest divides, empathy is how we refuse to let violence have the final word.
