By Richard Warnica, Toronto Star
September 12th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
Charlie Kirk, one of the most influential organizers and activists in American right-wing politics, was shot and killed Wednesday while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University, in Orem, Utah. I probably didn’t need to tell you that. If you’re reading this, you likely know the details already: of the shooting and the backlash; of the manhunt (such as it was. The police didn’t catch the shooter. His dad turned him in); and the fiery and largely pointless online debates about who has and has not condemned whom with enough clarity and zeal.
As I typed this Friday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump had just finished telling Fox News that authorities had a suspect in custody. As I finished the piece, that suspect was identified as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah resident. Police apparently found both fired and unfired bullets tied to Robinson’s gun engraved with messages that all seemed less ideological than just deeply online: “Hey fascist! Catch!”; “If you read this, you are gay LMAO;” and, in a reference to an obscure meme, “Notices Bulges, OwO.”
By the time you read this, we may know more about Robinson’s background and motivations. But based on past experience, I don’t expect those details, no matter what they reveal, to change much about the debate over Kirk’s killing.
Charlie Kirk: “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.”
If there’s one thing America has proved again and again, it’s that no shooting, no matter how deadly or high profile, ever changes much of anything. In the U.S., gun murders are part of the fabric, not just of school life and work life, but of political life too. Kirk himself knew that. He considered gun deaths part of the grand American bargain. “I think it’s worth it,” he said in 2023. “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.”
Nothing changed in America after a depressed student murdered 32 classmates at Virginia Tech university in 2007. Nothing changed after 26 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary. Nothing changed after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel Methodist Church. Nothing changed after James T. Hodgkinson shot up a Congressional baseball practice. Nothing changed after Vance Boelter murdered Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband this summer.
Trump held a parade the day Hortman died. I was there. He didn’t even mention her name.
So no, I don’t think Kirk’s murder will be an inflection point in American history. I don’t think it will lead to any actual changes, at least not the kind that would result in fewer gun deaths or less violence in America. I was in Milwaukee, at the Republican National Convention, days after Trump himself was shot and nearly killed at a rally in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2024. I remember all the columns and punditry about how everything had changed, how he had changed, how the race had changed, how politics must change.
Nothing changed. Two weeks later, it was barely a story.
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I really knew nothing about this man until his assassination. While I feel sad that his life ended this way, he is one more American gun victim. I would have preferred we talk about JahVai Roy the 8 year old Toronto boy who was likely killed by an illegal gun and what Canada is doing about that issue and bail reform. After taking the summer off parliament is back in action and this should be job one.
The US need never raise their flags as long as guns and Donald Trump are part of the fabric of American life. They cherry pick the parts of their constitution to uphold and those parts to ignore.