Popular conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was fatally shot yesterday during a speaking event at a Utah campus. The details don’t need recapitulation, and words alone cannot do justice at expressing the horror witnessed that day. The point is, violence is the new normal, and it’s going to get worse. The assassination attempt of Donald Trump during a 2024 rally under similar circumstances has set a precedent for targeted, politically-motivated violence. This was also seen earlier this year when United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was also ambushed and fatally shot.
Alluding to my article a few days ago, assassinations are extremely high-convexity, with the potential to alter the course of history by a lone individual. If anything, it’s something of a miracle assassinations aren’t more common. But now, extreme caution is called for. It was reckless to have Mr. Kirk seated unprotected in such a way that a sniper had a line of sight at him from a rooftop, without clearing the area first. I guess the assumption was he was not important enough to justify these precautions. Or maybe the organizers felt ‘safe’ in a Utah, a highly ‘red state, an assumption that obv9usly proved fatal.
The killer is still at large. It’s not unheard of for an assailant to evade capture for many days, as was seen in the case of Luigi Mangione, who wasn’t apprehended until five days had passed after he had shot Brian Thompson. The assailant has the advantage of having a head start by taking advantage of the confusion of the situation–as when, yesterday, an elderly man in the audience was mistakenly singled out as a suspect, wasting precious seconds and diverting attention from finding the real killer–and having a getaway system in place.