Anthony ZurcherNorth America correspondent
Moments before the shot changed everything, thousands of students had gathered on an idyllic Utah College under a clear blue sky to hear from a man who was seen as a rock star in the conservative campus policy.
When 31-year-old Charlie Kirk sat under a tent and debated over political opponents who were on a microphone, many gathered on the lawn and some protested. Seconds later, they all ran out of horror.
The activist was hit by a ball that was fatally wounded. The episode took place as cameras, some showed the murder in the bloody detail.
The pictures will be difficult to forget – especially for the many young conservatives, for which Kirk celebrity status thought. The leader of her movement, regardless of the ultimate motive behind his killing, is now considered a martyr for the matter.
In the past, Kirk had warned of the threat of violence by his critics, of whom he had many in view of his provocative style of conservatism. Nevertheless, he was ready to travel to the College Campus, where politics often tipped to the left and debated all arrivals.
He was an advocate of weapons rights and conservative values, a pronounced critic of transgender rights and a staunch, excessive, excessive Donald Trump trailer. His turning point of the US organization played a key role in the turnout, in which the president returned to the White House this year.
The tent in which he was shot had “prove me wrong” to draw it. He was in particular a hero of young conservative students, met them where they were and offered them their own movement.
Kirk’s killing is both another episode of shocking gun violence in America-Also the latest in an ever binding series of recent political violence.
At the beginning of this year, two democratic legislators in Minnesota were shot in their houses – and one died of their wounds. Last year Donald Trump was twice as much assassination. His brush with a ball with a rally outdoors in Butler, Pennsylvania, appears striking similarities to the shootings on Wednesday in Utah – both played out before they were collected outdoors.
Two years earlier, an attacker with a hammer broke into the home of the then house spokesman Nancy Pelosi, a prominent Democrat. In 2017, a man opened the fire to Republican Congressmen who practiced on a baseball field in North Virginia.
It is difficult too divine where American politics is from here, but the trajectory is bleak.
Violence creates violence. The increasingly split rhetoric, which is heated by echo chambers on social media and slight access to firearms, leads to Rohnerven and an increased potential for bloodshed.
Conservative activists rethink what security measures are required for public phenomena, as well as many local politicians according to the shootings in Minnesota. But the Butler attempt in Trump’s life was almost successful, despite the trained local and federal security forces on site.
If there is a feeling that nobody is sure that public life itself has become blood sports-this will have its own corrosive effect on American politics.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump published the truth on Wednesday evening, the killing a “dark moment for America”.
But he wasted little time to accuse the “radical left” for Kirk’s murder. He ticked some of the recent cases of political violence – those who aimed – and said that his government would “find everyone who contributed to this atrocity and other political violence”.
These comments are certainly welcomed by those on the right side who were asked to act against left -wing groups in the hours after the shootout.
“It is time to infiltrate, disrupt and arrest within the boundaries of the law that are responsible for this chaos,” wrote the conservative activist Christopher Rufo about X.
Many prominent Republicans and Democrats, including potential 2028 presidential candidates, condemned political violence and demand rhetoric cooling.
But in the congress on Wednesday evening a moment for Kirk quickly followed from a screaming match between the legislators – another indication that the partisan stresses are still high.
In Utah, witnesses, law enforcement agencies as well as state and local leaders will continue to get into the trade fair with the trauma of the day.
In emotional comments during a press conference, Governor Spencer Cox described, who has often spoken out against overheated political rhetoric and political division, a nation to celebrate a milestone of the foundation that is “broken”.
“Is that?” he asked. “Is it what we have thrown on us for 250 years?”
“I pray, that’s not the case,” he replied.
The doubt in his voice underlined the simple truth that the future of America on this day and whether its violent policy can be remedied.
