Editorial
Charlie Kirk, the conservative political activist and founder of Turning Point USA who was gunned down last week at a college campus in Utah, was a speaker at last year’s Republican Presidential Mock Convention at Washington and Lee University. He wasn’t actually physically present at W&L but addressed the convention via Skype when a family emergency prevented his coming to Lexington.
Speaking to the mock conventioneers on Feb. 9, 2024, Kirk, who was only 30 years old at the time, said, “My job and my goal is to make the Republican Party one that actually puts this country first, puts this generation first and passes down a stable country.” A staunch supporter of Donald Trump and an advocate for drawing younger voters to the GOP, Kirk said the then-former president “speaks for the forgotten man and woman of this country that are seeing themselves materially get poorer.”
Trump, of course, won the nomination at the mock convention, was nominated at the real Republican convention over the summer and was elected president last November.
Kirk was a heavy hitter for the GOP and his violent death has sent shock waves through political circles of all persuasions. Political violence, unfortunately, has a long history in this country, and neither the right nor the left is immune. The one commonality is that such incidents of violence most often involve a gun. This key factor is what separates the United States from other affluent, developed countries. The U.S. has a gun violence problem that sets it apart from its peer nations.
According to the Center For Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University, 46,728 people died by gun violence in 2023, the most recent year in which such statistics are available. That’s an average of one death every 11 minutes.
There were 17,927 firearm homicides and 27,300 firearm suicides that year while 463 died by unintentional gun injury. An average of more than 200 people visited the emergency room every day for nonfatal firearm injuries. Homicide deaths by firearms occur in the U.S. at a rate that is nearly 25 times higher than those in other high-income countries. Suicide deaths by firearms are nearly 10 times higher than those of other high-income countries.
According to the most recent data compiled by Everytown Research & Policy, the annual gun homicide rate in the U.S. is 4.382 per 100,000 residents, substantially higher than the rates for other industrialized nations such as Japan (.001) the United Kingdom (.049), Germany (.1), Australia (.154), the Netherlands (.186), New Zealand (.245), France (.4) and Canada (.672).
In recent years, firearms have become the leading cause of death for children ages 1-17 in the U.S., according to a report published in the Guardian. The firearm mortality rate for children in the U.S. far exceeds that of its peer nations. The rate (36.4 deaths per million) is 72 times higher than it is in the United Kingdom.
Our point here is that the U.S. has a definite gun violence problem. Our state and federal lawmakers must come to grips with this farreaching problem at some point to reduce the accessibility of firearms to those who would do harm to others.
In the current climate of political polarization, we are worried that this problem may be exacerbated by political violence. To curtail this threat, we urge everyone of all political views to tone down the rhetoric. In our public discourse, we can respectfully disagree with each other. There is no reason to contribute to what is already a very serious gun violence problem in our country.
