The US is wringing its hands over Kirk’s death – but ignores the elephant in the room

3 hours ago 1

Opinion

September 16, 2025 — 12.07pm

There’s a scene in an episode of House in which the cantankerous doctor, overhearing a colleague discuss a case, listens as the patient’s doting son denies his mother’s alcohol use could be the cause of her symptoms.

An eavesdropping Dr House coughs, turns around from his chair and bellows: “Of course it’s the alcohol!”

This is a bad analogy because, in the end, it wasn’t the alcohol. But for the past few days, amid the non-stop discussion of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I’ve wanted to adopt Dr House’s tone and scream: “It’s the guns!”

Since Kirk’s murder last Wednesday, the US has been embroiled in something akin to a national panic over politically motivated violence. The axes of the debate? Whether the left or the right is worse, and to what extent social media is to blame.

Barely a word is being said about the prevalence of guns – handguns, rifles, machine guns, you name it – in the hands of this increasingly angry and divided citizenry.

We shouldn’t be surprised. If the US couldn’t enact meaningful reform after Sandy Hook, when 20 children and six adults were gunned down at a primary school in 2012, it probably never will.

A memorial for slain MAGA activist Charlie Kirk (left) and suspect Tyler Robinson, 22 (right).

But as an outsider in this country, this silence on the real problem is deafening to me.

The Sunday morning political talk shows dealt almost exclusively with the Kirk killing and its consequences. There was a lot of chat about doing better as a nation, soul-searching, lowering the temperature and coming together.

And yet, there was no discussion at all about gun rights or laws. Incredibly, on CBS’ Face the Nation, the words “gun” and “weapon” were not mentioned – not even once – during an hour of programming, a transcript showed. That’s an apt summary of the debate writ large. For all the hand-wringing about political violence, no one is talking about the reason anger, hate and violence in this country are so much more deadly than elsewhere.

Utah, where Kirk was assassinated while speaking at a college campus, has some of the loosest gun laws in a country of loose gun laws. It’s legal for Utah residents over 21 to carry a gun – openly or concealed – without a permit. Indeed, just weeks ago, the state relaxed gun laws on college campuses.

Rather, we are told social media is to blame. Spencer Cox, the Utah governor, called it a cancer on society. Former transport secretary and potential Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, appearing on Meet the Press, spoke of young men spending too much time alone in dark rooms. Republican senator Lindsey Graham plugged a bill that would strip social media platforms of their shield against being sued over user-generated content, accusing tech companies of “radicalising our nation”.

This is not to discount the role social media plays in corroding public discourse, although politicians frequently use it as a scapegoat, including in Australia. But social media does not put guns on shelves or in people’s hands.

Naturally, we are all interested in the alleged killer’s motive. We want to know his background, his politics, and how he became “radicalised”. All of that is important to ascertain. But there is every chance that when you boil it down, he is just another nutter with a gun.

We all have weirdos on the fringes of the political spectrum (just take a glance inside any political journalist’s inbox). Only the US makes it exceptionally easy for them to access dangerous weapons.

Clearly, Kirk would not want his legacy to involve any backpedalling on gun rights. In 2023, he said gun deaths were unfortunately the price society had to pay to uphold the “God-given” right to bear arms. His conservative friends and allies were never likely to embrace gun reform, despite his tragic fate.

But it does appear the full picture is lost on them. President Donald Trump is presently on a crusade against violent crime in American cities. On Monday (Tuesday AEST), he announced the National Guard would now be sent to Memphis, replicating what he did in Washington. Chicago would be next, he said.

There have been 149 murders in Memphis so far this year, in a city of about 600,000, and about 70 per cent of violent crime in the city involves a gun. In 2023, Memphis had more than 390 homicides.

“In Chicago, they’re getting beat to hell, they’re being shot,” Trump said. “If six or seven people die over a weekend, they consider that a successful weekend.”

The president is right about out-of-control gun crime in American cities. But it just shows that while the US might have a problem with political violence, first and foremost it has a problem with violence.

It’s the guns, people.