After creeping onto the roof of a one-story building at Utah Valley University, a disturbed young man aimed his high-powered rifle over the crowd and fired a hundred-fifty-yard shot that killed controversial political activist Charlie Kirk and wounded free speech in the United States. Ultra conservatives who championed the telegenic Kirk instantly called for violence to stop purported liberal assaults on their champions. Those on the other extreme of the political divide, hiding in anonymity, thanked the bullet for hitting Charlie Kirk in the neck. Those heathens need to be told that the murder of a husband and father isn’t amusing or proof of their political rectitude.

The rest of us must wake up and acknowledge that the nation is lurching toward anarchy, and liberty is the target. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression – FIRE – the group annually polls seventy thousand college students and asks if they would ever feel justified using violence to stop someone from speaking on their campus. The answer: thirty-four percent believe force is sometimes appropriate to silence a dissenting opinion. Neither left nor right can celebrate this result: FIRE says thirty-six percent of the fascists were “very Liberal” and thirty-seven percent “very conservative.”

Rather than cringe, we’re thankful that the remaining two-thirds of students evidently believe in free speech. Charlie Kirk exercised his first amendment right to declare that some gun deaths in the United States are worthwhile to ensure survival of the second amendment. Kirk was wrong that we need gun deaths to protect guns laws that will doubtless continue to ensure any unstable wretch who wants can get a military style assault rifle like the one that killed him. Charlie Kirk had the right to call Martin Luther King “awful” and decry advances created by the civil rights movement. Kirk was wrong, but he motivated his followers. He had the right to compare legal abortions to the Holocaust and declare that pregnancies should never be terminated, even if his prepubescent daughter was raped and impregnated. Charlie Kirk, again, was wrong.

But he and his political adversaries would now agree that the nation has a critical security issue: political rallies need to be held indoors where snipers cannot hit distant targets or sneak in guns. I didn’t conduct a comprehensive study on this matter. I didn’t have to. I simply jotted some names of politicians who were attacked, fatally or not, during the last six decades. Those assailed outdoors, in chronological order, were John F. Kennedy, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, George Wallace, Gerald Ford – I was there – and two weeks later Ford again, Ronald Reagan, Gabby Giffords, and Donald Trump. All appeared outside, unnecessarily vulnerable. The only indoors victims I noted were Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy Sr.

Let’s start with two steps. Move all major political rallies inside. And stay home if you don’t like what the speaker will probably say. How difficult is that? It’s appallingly simple and therefore probably impossible.

Notes: Tyler Robinson, a white college dropout, age twenty-two, was arrested in Southern Utah less than forty-eight hours after the murder of Charlie Kirk. He comes from a MAGA-supporting Republican family of gun owners.

George Thomas Clark page on Amazon