# How long would Charlie Kirk have lasted here?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-would-charlie-kirk-have-lasted-here/1023044>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [September 14, 2025, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-would-charlie-kirk-have-lasted-here/1023044 "2025-09-14T21:59:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 75

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**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\
**Post date:** [September 16, 2025, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-would-charlie-kirk-have-lasted-here/1023044/75 "2025-09-16T11:52:13Z")

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> [@DemonTree](#):
>
> you are comparing bananas to bean sprouts, and that is exactly the point at issue.

And you are throwing in domestic incidents and gang violence into a discussion on spree shootings as indeed Charlie Kirk loved to do in order to “report stats like this in a misleading way”. Introducing noise into the data is a useful deflection technique to minimize data points that one wishes to avoid acknowledging. To borrow your analogy, you’re throwing as many bananas as possible into the blender to avoid discussion of the taste of beanspouts.

For example, in paragraphs like this..

> [@DemonTree](#):
>
> What enormous number of right-wing spree shooters? The huge majority of mass shootings are domestic disputes, gang/assaults, or other non-ideological events. Ideologically motivated mass shootings are under 1% of the total, and some of those were done by Islamic extremists and left-wing extremists.

…you pretty much drop the entire fruitbowl in. Interesting that even in the context of politically-motivated attacks you specifically reference Islamist and left-wing attacks while handwaving away right-wing attacks which over the past years and decades far outstrip the other two categories you mentioned.

> [@DemonTree](#):
>
> I’m not going to do any more in-depth research unless someone starts a dedicated thread

By your own admission, you didn’t do any in the first place.

> [@DemonTree](#):
>
> There are multiple definitions of mass shooting, mass killing, spree killing etc used in different databases, giving _very_ different counts. Like, one or more orders of magnitude different. Some collect information on motive, and others don’t. You cannot simply take a count from one database and divide it by the total in another, because they are based on very different criteria. Nor can you take a count of ‘famous cases in the media’ and divide it by one of these totals, because again, the criteria to be included will be very different

An interesting way of pre-emptively dismissing any data that doesn’t support one’s conclusions.

> [@DemonTree](#):
>
> Making this misleading comparison is what the guy in the audience was seemingly planning to do.

If by “guy in the audience” you mean Charlie Kirk, sure. And thank you for providing an example of what it would be like to have him here.

> [@DemonTree](#):
>
> it is my view that we should properly understand the facts, and the limitations of the data

I think we understand them just fine. And the rhetoric as well.

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