So notes The Guardian, which then quotes Hasan Piker:

“A bulletproof vest would not have saved Charlie Kirk. Security did not save Charlie Kirk. The only thing that could have potentially saved Charlie Kirk from getting shot in the neck was reasonable gun control.”

Then it quotes Josh Sugarmann:

Josh Sugarmann, executive of the Violence Policy Center which has tracked the proliferation of the sniper subculture, sees its growth as part of the increasing militarization of the gun industry and its civilian offerings. “No one notices or seems to care that there is an industry actively designing and building the weapons that enable shooters to more effectively commit assassinations and mass shootings,” he said.

“The gun industry is designing, building and promoting rifles that are effective at much longer range with the goal of ‘one shot, one kill’.”

Open carry laws make it particularly hard to secure public events because the visible presence of firearms creates a dangerous ambiguity. Law enforcement can’t easily distinguish between a person legally carrying a weapon and someone preparing to commit violence. This ambiguity slows down response times, heightens the risk of mistakes and can turn routine security situations into potential crises. It unequivocally makes it harder for law enforcement to do their jobs, and it puts them at greater risk of harm.

… [V]isible guns at gatherings can intimidate participants, escalate tensions and even deter people from attending altogether, undermining the safety and openness of community spaces — especially when open carry can be, and has been, used by extremist groups as a tool to intimidate others at protests or public gatherings.

[Utah] students as young as 18 can openly carry guns on college campuses … and the state also allows concealed weapons on Utah’s campuses.

[M]ost Americans — including conservatives and gun owners — actually feel less safe when more people are carrying guns in public. [The gun] industry has a singular solution for this fear: Just buy a gun. 

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Abundant, visible, guns make the assassin’s job easier.

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 ‘[A]sk yourself what somebody was doing carrying a large hunter’s rifle around a university campus.

… Did Utah’s weak gun laws kill Charlie Kirk? We can’t say that. But weak gun laws probably made his death more likely. Kirk’s admirers will do his legacy no favors if they continue to oppose gun control. Better that they join the rest of us in working to prevent the next Charlie Kirk from meeting the same awful fate.’

Let this comment, from the incoming president of the Oxford Union (!), stand for all the vile statements many people are making about Kirk’s assassination. The Oxford Union used to be a pretty classy outfit; why they’re handing it over to someone dissolute enough to publish something like this is a mystery.

The loopiest litigatrix this side of Liguria just walked into a buzz saw: Harvard is suing her.

Tyler Robinson, resident of Utah (death penalty? yes), seems to be the dude. “A family member saw the photos of the suspect and turned him into police,” says here. 22 years old.

Apparently his father (a pastor? not all of this information is confirmed) turned him in. He seems to have won a big fancy scholarship to Utah State University a few years ago.

I guess when you put it like that, twenty years in prison doesn’t seem overlong.

… addresses the Judaism of one of her colleagues.

“I have a good surgeon if you ever want to get your nose done.“

… would I guess be a good poetic form of address to UD’s beloved country at the moment (the phrase titles a 1925 poem by Robinson Jeffers). The Murder of Kirk becomes a singular, symbolizing, culmination, an event that rises above the murk of our bloody country’s bloody every day. Give me back my son; he was only thirty-one wails Kirk’s father at his memorial site, a one-man tragic chorus that cuts through all of it.

Our streets are pocked with juvenile assassins, skinny boys with fat rifles, schizophrenics with steady fingers. Our bottomless gun-greed means we won’t be saving ourselves anytime soon – not under a president who won election based on his own bullet wound. Thus America makes choosing our leaders easy: Not the ones with the fatal neck wounds; the ones with the non-lethal neck wounds.

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No parades, don’t you see; no sunny tented gatherings of the sort that killed Kirk. We Americans must crawl over blood and glass into bunkers while keeping an eye on the roofs and windows from which the Kirk killer and Stephen Paddock and the rest of them aim at us. We must eye one another as potential shooters.

Democracy cannot really survive the absolute death of the public realm, a realm as imperiled by our insane willingness to let incredibly dangerous people roam the streets as it is by our gun-greed. Americans continue to recite the NRA’s mentally retarded litany – “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” – even though Utah Valley University is an open carry campus, meaning plenty of people in Kirk’s audience were armed. Lots of good guys with guns. But hey turns out they can’t do anything about a sharpshooter on a roof! Huh!

Reminders from FIRE.

What a nice idea. Some gun laws.

UD stopped watching MSNBC when she realized she’d been an idiot for believing their smug insistence that Trump would never win. So she wasn’t watching when Matthew Dowd, one of their commentators, said Charlie Kirk was responsible for his own demise:

 [H]ateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions… You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place…

Dowd has been fired, which is fine, but there’s more where that came from at MSNBC.

Never a dull moment when every insane dipshit in the country has a gun. Don’t know yet whether Kirk, a prominent conservative sitting on a stage waiting to give a speech and then slumped over and bleeding from a neck wound, will survive. Or whether, if he does survive, the bullet has damaged his brain.

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Active shooter, Colorado high school. I think we’re almost up to one a day.

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Kirk has died.

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Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024. Last December, a shooter targeted and killed the head of United Healthcare. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was burned in an arson attack in April. Judges and elected officials report increased threats and harassment. Several instances of violence have stemmed from opposition to the Gaza war. In June, a man dressed as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and wounded another state lawmaker and his wife. A gunman attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in August, killing a police officer.

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Oh, and the Colorado school shooting: Two students in critical condition. A mother at the scene:

“I think if I’m being honest with myself, I always knew it was ‘When, not if?’”

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Oh, and back to Utah: It’s an open carry state, colleges included, and it’s so routine to see people carrying guns that I doubt the killer – even if his AK 47 or whatever was slung in front of his chest – attracted much interest.

Commentary from one of the encampment’s residents: “There’s a school right there. It looks bad, people leaving needles all over and there’s people nodded out … like it’s just gross.”

Yeah, looks bad, elementary students walking around syringes and deadheads to get to their school building… Unfortunately, the mass murder of other local schoolchildren meant a delay in a scheduled meeting about the problem…

She has absolutely no memory of it. She just discovered this photograph – taken in the late ‘seventies, I guess – in the University of Chicago archives.

https://www.threads.com/@profgalloway/post/DOUUz-BiEJM/media?xmt=AQF0KH1VTARZsSurzmxkyIQtP2TeJiUqeSoQ79ojhfq8Yg