[tmsh]

Looking at recent events through a historical lens: the 1960s saw the assassinations of MLK, RFK, JFK, and Malcolm X during a wave of progressive change. Today’s assassination attempts and targeted violence seem to follow a similar pattern during periods of significant social and political shifts.

As RFK said after MLK’s death, we must choose between “violence and non-violence, between lawlessness and love.” His call for unity and rejecting hatred feels as urgent now as it was then.

Violence is never the answer. But understanding these tragic patterns might help us navigate our current moment with hopefully more empathy.

[pm90]

This is dangerous false equivalency. Charlie Kirk was not advocating for the rights of the downtrodden. He was a right wing provocateur, and he’s on the record saying that “some gun deaths are ok” in service of the 2nd amendment, and in making light of the nearly deadly political attack on the Pelosi family.

Political violence, especially deadly violence is not ok. But comparing Charlie Kirk to MLK is also not ok.

[strken]

"Some gun deaths are okay" is saying the quiet part out loud, but it's not wrong. When you let a large group of people have access to something dangerous then some number of them will die and kill using the dangerous thing, whether the thing is cars or paracetamol or wingsuits or guns.

I say this as an Australian. We have a far more restrictive system of gun control than the US and yet we still see tens of gun deaths a year, because some gun deaths are okay even if we set the number a lot lower than the US does.

[tirant]

By my understanding he said that though unfortunate, gun deaths are sometimes a price to pay for the right to bear arms. Noting that less than half that gun killings in the US are committed by people that legally owned that gun.

And I have the sensation that all the ones we drive a car nowadays are engaging in a similar type of risk acceptance, we know there's too many people dead every year in car accidents, but we still believe that overall having access to cars outweighs the risks, without meaning that car accidents are acceptable and trying to improve the safety of the cars and roads meanwhile.

Kirk thought in a similar way that gun control and possession were definitely good for the US population and that gun deaths were still a price to pay for it.

BTW, gun possession is also legal in all EU countries. It just not considered a right, but a privilege. And this is accepted by most parties in EU, both left and right.

[darkerside]

Was this one of the OK ones?

[strken]

I'm not an American, I'm an Australian. Our gun deaths sit at 0.9 per 100000 people instead of 14 per 100000 and I approve of our gun laws. In that sense, I guess I'd say that roughly 6% of this gun death was okay.

In a broader sense, it is of course not okay to shoot someone, but that's taking the quote out of the context of gun control measures.

[nailer]

He means lets not disarm ourselves for evil. Not that evil is OK, but that some evil may occur due to not disarming.

I disagree with him on guns, but that is the point.

[thrance]

Evil is happening right now, the guns are freaking useless.

[pfannkuchen]

Yeah I don’t really get the 2A people who want guns to protect from a tyrannical government. To do that you’d need to make a whole lot of other things legal like tanks, anti aircraft missiles, artillery, etc, and allow civilian groups to get together and practice using those things for combat. Without that, the intent of the 2A has sailed long ago.

[MisterBastahrd]

It isn't okay for anyone to die from gun violence, but if we're gonna have to expect people to be sacrificed on the altar of the gun nut lobby, then it makes the most sense that the gun nuts should be the ones to suffer the consequences of the policies they support. The tree of liberty and blood blah blah blah.

[dazilcher]

Is anyone on the right asking for stricter gun control laws as result? That should answer your gotcha question.

[throwaway-11-1]

yes, the DOJ

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/politics/transgender-firearms...

[8note]

id interpret what he meant differently than "some gun deaths are ok"

instead his opinion is more, "all gun deaths are ok"

he was never going to be worried about the count or a more nuanced comparison of how many gun deaths are acceptable

[b0ringdeveloper]

Would you say that some car deaths are OK in service of transportation or that we should lower the speed limit until there are 0 deaths from vehicle accidents?

Tradeoffs between rights and safety are always made. I interpret "some gun deaths are ok" as to mean that they are inherently dangerous, and that seeking 0 accidental deaths is too high of a standard for something to be allowed. And we don't hold other parts of daily life to this standard, like vehicles or medicine. If you want to get into degrees, that's fine, but a blanket shutdown on the sentence doesn't do that.

[pm90]

Transportation is required for daily life for almost all Americans. Gun ownership isn’t.

If it were upto me, we wouldn’t have such a car dependent culture. It is absolutely possible to invest in public transportation/multimodal transport and reduce this number significantly.

[jalapenos]

They certainly are, police cause gun deaths all the time in service of maintaining law and order.

But to middle class snobs who think they're morally above it all, such dirtiness is a reality they can wave away with a dismissive comment of superiority, safe from all that messiness, in their nice suburb homes.

So long as they intentionally ignore these lower class facts that some wrongdoers exist who can literally only be stopped by deadly force, they can continue to put their chins up and lament the inferior-to-them simpletons who think guns have to be a thing, in between taking long savouring sniffs of their excrement after every bathroom visit.

[bigyabai]

Speaking as an amoral low-class snob who grew up in Detroit, the prevalence of concealed carry didn't make me feel any safer than I felt in Windsor. Lot more gunfire at night on the stars-and-stripes side of the river too, which always struck me as rude when people are trying to sleep.

[Mawr]

And why exactly do police need to have guns on them at all times? Right, because each citizen they meet has a high chance of having one. In contrast, UK police don't carry guns. Let that fact sink in.

[jalapenos]

I'm not surprised. The UK police prefer to arrest people for mean tweets, and let the knife criminals run around Scot-free. Perhaps if they had guns they'd do their jobs properly (joke - they still wouldn't).

Police worldwide, where guns are usually illegal, are usually armed.

[Sabinus]

There are many countries on Earth that don't need every citizen to have easy access to military hardware to protect them from the underclass.

[euLh7SM5HDFY]

> that we should lower the speed limit until there are 0 deaths from vehicle accidents

We totally should. I mean it isn't even controversial idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero . If we start with "all traffic related deaths are excessive" then trying to get rid of them in any way possible is only natural. Shame that 2nd amendment fans will be against any requirements for gun owners, event if they are similar to European commercial drivers tests.

Psychological test before buying a gun? What a heresy.

[olalonde]

You've missed the parent's point. Society routinely accepts some level of risk, even when it leads to deaths, in exchange for other values. For example, dogs kill about 43 people annually in the U.S., yet we still allow them as pets. Electricity causes over 1,000 deaths a year, yet we don’t ban it. Kirk's position was simply that gun deaths are an acceptable price for the right to own guns - a fairly mainstream view in the US.

[thrance]

What do we get out of guns that would justify all those deaths, exactly?

[Sabinus]

You can keep poor people in more desperate circumstances, and fantasise about how you and your militia will resist a tyrannical federal government and restore the country.

[olalonde]

Hunting, entertainment, tyranny prevention and respect of the constitution.

[Mawr]

To that I would say that the relationship between vehicle speeds and deaths is not linear. Lowering speeds (via infrastructure, not limits) in cities to 20mph / 30km/h would probably cut deaths by 80% without affecting average travel times much.

It is a great analogy though, in both cases the issue comes down to ease of access to deadly weapons capable of killing a lot of people in a short time period. I remain ever surprised that we think the average person is qualified to handle such weapons, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

[antifa]

If I say yes, are we going to start building high speed rail?

[blasphemers]

People are hit by trains all the time.

[yencabulator]

Approximately zero deaths from road dangers is a valid goal, without having to pretend it's impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[ironman1478]

Even if we ignore the gun topic, he was extremely anti abortion, including in rape situations. He argued for heinous perspectives and oppression.

He didn't deserve to die, but he wasn't advocating for a world of opportunity and hope. Just oppression and hate. Let's not act like he was some saint helping people.

[dinkumthinkum]

But the problem is what you're saying doesn't follow. Charlie Kirk believed that abortion involves murdering a human being, violently, which it does. He believe in the rare circumstance of a pregnancy occurring from rape that the child is still innocent and should not be killed. That is explicitly advocating for life and non-violence, whether you agree with the premise or not. I think the left really has to reckon with something extremely important. As much as the left is pompous and pretends to be so much more "educated" that conservatives, they have a hard time following through positions logically, which is seems quite odd for supposed intellectual superiors.

[antifa]

> hard time following through positions logically,

Spoken like a person who either doesn't know or doesn't care that current anti-abortion policies in several red states have women scared to get pregnant, despite wanting to do so voluntarily, because doctors are refusing life saving procedures on the mother if the state can possibly perceive it as abortion, leading to many scenarios of live births to dead mothers, including one case of a corpse being artificially kept alive for weeks for the sake of the baby.

The abortion laws of most blue states are already a rational compromise (still a very conservative leaning one) between the practical rights of women and the religious beliefs of far right totalitarians.

[nandomrumber]

31 seconds.

Every thirty one seconds an abortion is carried out in the US.

[ironman1478]

What about if a person can't support their child at that time in their life and they don't have a support system to help them? the government doesn't make it easy to give a kid up for adoption and also doesn't make it easy to adopt kids. The kid will likely not have a good life, especially as the government cuts benefits. Is it really worth bringing a child into this world if you're setting them up to fail? Is that really the correct thing to do? Are you really being kind to the child by kicking it in the teeth from birth?

What if the birth will kill the mother? Is that not okay either?

It's not even political. You just follow the logic and you kind of have to support abortion. There isn't really a logical reason not to.

I actually believe the world is really messy and you have to have solutions that deal with the messiness. Being absolutist in any direction will never be right. Taking the extreme opposite position of mandated abortions is equally stupid and quite frankly as childish. It's surprising anybody on this site would defend something so illogical.

Also read this: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/16/what-actually-happens-w...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770

[nake89]

> What about if a person can't support their child at that time in their life and they don't have a support system to help them?

I think a pro-lifer would say that intentionally terminating a human being would still be wrong. I have a very hard time disagreeing with them on that.

> What if the birth will kill the mother? To my knowledge the vast majority of abortions are not because of this and all pro-lifers I know would be in favor of saving the mother. Most are for "convenience" and that is what pro-lifers are against. Again, I have a hard time disagreeing with them on this topic as well.

[Cornbilly]

He also spread the rumors that Pelosi’s attacker was just an upset gay lover.

[thephyber]

I don’t get why people are downvoting this. It is factually true, even if it’s uncomfortable to point out on the day of his murder.

Kirk was not a benevolent truth seeker. He was a political provocateur and propagandist dressed as a debater. And Paul Pelosi was one of the victims of his smears.

[typeofhuman]

He was advocating for the rights of the living yet unborn. He was advocating for the downtrodden youth who are being unnecessarily overburdened with massive college debt and unable to afford a home. He was advocating for citizens who are being put last by their electorate.

[thrance]

He was helping the "unborn" by advocating for stripping womens of their rights and sending them back to the house.

He was helping students by supporting the most anti-intellectual party ever, that cancelled student debt relief and help programs.

He was helping the downtrodden by supporting the most billionaire-friendly administration ever, giving tax breaks to the rich and dismantling the last of our social safety nets.

Get real. I don't even buy that you believe all that shit.

[tirant]

A small but important correction. The debt was never cancelled, but socialized and payed by all the American citizens. A loan that was taken voluntarily by adults was arbitrarily reassigned and forced upon the rest of the American citizens, including all those who never had accepted to take such debt.

Completely violating the principles of personal responsibility.

It is very easy to be generous and altruist with someone else's money and then even take the credit for it.

[thrance]

Public higher education yields more skilled workers, who contribute more to society, thereby being a net positive overall. That's how it works in civilized country anyways. Too bad the average American can't think further then "Me no share, fuck you".

[typeofhuman]

"Public higher education yields more skilled workers" as compared to what? Laborers or trade-skill workers? I think people overestimate the ROI of a college diploma.

Let's just assume you are correct. The solution should be universities lower or eliminate tuition. Not exponentially increase it. Not pay presidents and coaches millions and millions of dollars. And not stick taxpayers with the bill - or devalue our currency with government spending.

[tmsh]

Right it’s more that it’s odd that there’s all these assassinations of conservatives (UnitedHealthCare etc). And previously there were many assassinations of progressives. I think it’s just the leaders in a dominant part of a force in society become casualties. Loss of life is always tragic even if we disagree with everything they stand for. But anyway the historical part (if that is what is happening - hard to tease out if there’s just more gun violence in general) helps me make sense of it. The dominant wave has breaks or we see them more somehow.

[solid_fuel]

It's not like the assassinations of progressives ever stopped - the Hoffmans were killed literally a few months ago. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le...

[tomjakubowski]

It's the Hortmans who were killed, the Hoffmans survived their attack. It's easy to confuse them because the assassin was working his way through an alphabetized list of democratic politicians.

[mynameyeff]

Indeed.