An article posted today that explicitly mentions retaliatory violence.
Turns out 40% of Americans are cool with it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/18/nx-s1-5542231/kirk-shooting-violence-social-media
I did find it rather troubling that so many peoples first instincts, in response to someone being brutally murdered, is to focus on the worst things the deceased ever said or did instead of on how horrible the murder was.
That’s always been the standard. People only get upset about it when the deceased isn’t part of an ethnic, political or religious group that it’s socially acceptable to kill. Like someone black or poor or Muslim; we’d be seeing far less hand-wringing about how terrible it is that people are unsympathetic and a lot more speeches about “they were no angel” if it was someone in a category like that. Or just outright ignored.
Instead of one our divinely ordained lords and masters, like a white male fascist or CEO. One of the masters being killed is unacceptable.
I had the same reaction after George Floyd was murdered.
Trayvon Martin, too, for that matter.
And I really could go on…
Yes. The Right Wing will simply declare the victims to be “thugs” that we shouldn’t be all that concerned about. George Floyd had a criminal history and a substance use problem, so why worry about him being brutally murdered by a cop in a city street in broad daylight while onlookers beg the cop to stop kneeling on his neck?
I mean I didn’t even know who the hell the guy was, and he sounds like a terrible person, so for people saying, “he was a terrible person, though” I can’t muster much surprise. I’m not exactly weeping and gnashing my teeth. But there’s no way I could watch something like that, and not be affected by it.
Harkening back twenty years to that aggression research lab, one of the more controversial findings was that if you place an otherwise well-adjusted person in front of a gaming console or a TV and expose them to violent media, nothing happens. But if you take a person who is already in a violent environment, whether it’s abuse at home or exposure to gang violence or whatever else, then exposure to violent media makes that person more likely to commit an act of violence.
I can’t help but conclude that this may be a factor now. While actual rates of violent crime have plummeted, in a sense it has never been more publicized, socially normalized, reinforced, and intentionally facilitated, as it has been now. You can go on Facebook or X and watch a video of an actual person dying a gruesome, violent death. It’s no longer a horror show only for the people who were gathered around him at that time, it’s a horror accessible by virtually everyone. And I think for some people, the people who ultimately commit these types of acts, the presence of all this violence is just that extra bit of social reinforcement they need to kill. It’s a cycle that feeds itself.
I doubt that the issue is violence in the media; it’s that violence is being actively encouraged by so many people on the Right from Trump on down. I’m reasonably sure that authority figures telling people to go do violence has more of an effect than pictures of random violence.
Pardoning all of the January 6 insurrectionists signaled to the Right that their violence would be excused as long as it’s in service of their cause.
OP title has been my thoughts exactly.
“My thoughts and prayers extend to the Kirk family.”
School shootings are worse IMO. We require to go to school. It is supposed to be a safe space. Kirk knowingly chose a dangerous profession. He always had security with him. They just failed him. Ideally, his profession wouldn’t be dangerous but here we are.
His profession was “rabble rousing fascist demagogue”. It’s very arguable how dangerous it should be, and is inherently dangerous since making society more violent is part of the point. People who throw around random firebombs risk getting burned.
I will say that active shooter training makes sense in a place like a DV shelter.
We have yet to have a shooting on premises but we were involved in a crisis line call in which someone was shot, and we periodically have abusers skulking around outside our premises. It’s very secure, and we’re just around the corner from the local police department, and they have cameras on everything, and they usually show up before we can call them about it, but yes. It’s the kind of place you want a clear protocol for that sort of thing.