Tyler McGettigan arrived early to see conservative activist Charlie Kirk speak at Utah Valley University, and was mildly surprised by the lack of check-in and security.
While waiting, he chatted with people about why they were there. They all had different opinions, he said. Some were fans, some not. One wanted to ask Kirk about veganism.
When a gunshot popped, McGettigan was standing about 50 metres away from the stage, looking at the right-hand side of Kirk’s face. “From the angle that I was at, it looked like his head was jolted back,” he said. “Then he collapsed backwards, and his chair collapsed backwards with him. I literally saw it happen.
“I’ve shot firearms before. I did have to think a little bit about, ‘Was that a gunshot?’ But it was pretty clear to my mind in two or three seconds: Yes, that was a gunshot, it definitely hit Charlie, and that’s bad.”
McGettigan, a 31-year-old Mormon Christian, conservative and self-confessed election nerd, came to ask Kirk a question about voting methods. He left as an eyewitness to a shocking assassination that immediately cemented political violence as a major crisis facing the United States and left many Americans frightened about what might come next in this bitterly divided country.
As the leader of a major political action group and a prominent ally of US President Donald Trump, Kirk was a highly visible and important member of the conservative movement, and touted as a future president. With the shooter still at large, Trump blamed the “radical left” for whipping up hatred about Kirk, while imploring all Americans and the media to confront the tragic consequences of demonising people with whom they disagreed.
It was a “dark day for America”, Trump declared. And the next morning, as the nation commemorated another grim day in its history, September 11, 2001, Americans were left with big questions about how their president would handle this juncture, and whether it was even possible to unpick the damage done by such pervasive hate.
George W. Bush, who led the US through the gruelling aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, issued a statement after Kirk’s shooting. “Violence and vitriol must be purged from the public square,” he said. “Members of other political parties are not our enemies; they are our fellow citizens.”
Trump spoke with Kirk’s “absolutely devastated” widow, Erika, while Vice President JD Vance, who was a close friend of the slain activist, travelled to Salt Lake City to comfort Kirk’s family. Vance then took them and Kirk’s casket home to Arizona on board Air Force Two. “Welcome home, Charlie. You didn’t deserve it,” an air traffic controller in Phoenix said after the plane touched down.
Tyler McGettigan. He was at Utah Valley University to see Kirk and witnessed the assassination.
But in Congress, some politicians grappling with the repercussions of this seismic event doubled down on their anger, took advantage of the information vacuum and looked to assign blame.
“Democrats own what happened today,” South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace said straight after the shooting. Asked if that meant Republicans owned acts of violence against Democrats, she said: “Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck, and you want to talk about Republicans right now? No, Democrats own this.”
The next day, Mace, a hardline anti-transgender campaigner, seized on unconfirmed newspaper reports that “transgender and anti-fascist ideology” was found engraved on ammunition inside the rifle seized by officers investigating Kirk’s death.
The Wall Street Journal later walked back the report, noting it came from an “early bulletin” circulating among law enforcement officials, and that other sources cautioned against reaching conclusions. [On Friday, authorities revealed the engravings on the cases included “Hey fascist, catch” and “If you read this you are gay LMAO”.]
But the claim had already exploded on social media and in conservative circles. Mace told reporters she feared for her safety, and would not hold any more outdoor events, nor any public ones, until safety protocols were bolstered.
“Just because I want to protect women, I’m worried about getting murdered? Are you f—ing kidding me?” she said, while using a slur against transgender people. “It’s out of control, and enough is enough. I’m going to double down on this. I’m going to be more vigilant than ever. I’m going to be louder than I’ve ever been until this shit stops. It’s got to stop.”
Congresswoman Nancy Mace speaking during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last year.Credit: AP
Trump doubled down too, telling reporters that while he wanted his supporters to respond to the assassination peacefully, “we have a radical left group of lunatics out there, just absolute lunatics, and we’re going to get that problem solved”.
Others took a different tack. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has cultivated an image lately as the Democrats’ chief critic of Trump, said he knew Kirk and admired his commitment to debate.
“His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence,” Newsom said.
Speaking outside the Capitol in Washington, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted that it had been the site of a mob attack on lawmakers on January 6, 2021, fanned by political outrage. She also noted the June murders of Minnesota Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, as well as the brazen, broad-daylight assassination of Kirk.
“We have been living in a time of extraordinary, growing political violence in the United States,” she said. “It really, at this point, is not about the political stripe. This is about the emergence and uncorking of violence. We need to really look towards our leaders to lower the temperature and lead.”
But it was the Governor of Utah, Republican Spencer Cox, who spoke most vividly in the hours and days after Kirk’s killing. After announcing on Friday that a suspect had been taken into custody – 22-year-old Tyler Robinson from Utah – Cox spoke of the urgent need to “find an off-ramp” to spiralling violence and anger.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox.Credit: AP
“I absolutely believe that this is a watershed in American history,” he said. “The question is what kind of watershed. That chapter remains to be written. Is this the end of a dark chapter in our history, or the beginning of a darker chapter in our history?”
Cox said the assassination of Kirk was much bigger than an attack on one individual. “It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been and who we could be in better times.”
Much ink has been devoted to Kirk’s own contributions to the temperature of political debate in American politics. He was unapologetically right-wing, played the game hard and thrived on outrage. He didn’t just mix religion and politics; he cast last year’s presidential election as a “spiritual battle”, with God on Trump’s side and Democrats standing against God’s will. He described empathy as a “made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage”.
But he also genuinely loved debate. Kirk was at the start of a campus tour in which anyone was invited to come on stage and challenge him at the “Prove Me Wrong Table”. He sought arguments on everything from abortion and transgender rights to climate change and affirmative action, where he typically stood on the hard-right end of the spectrum.
So, too, on gun rights. “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” he said in 2023, in a remark widely circulated following his assassination.
Indeed, Kirk advocated even more guns. “If our money and our sporting events and our aeroplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?” he said.
Overlooked in the upheaval was that, just as Kirk was being rushed to the hospital where he died, a 16-year-old in Colorado wounded two of his high school classmates and then killed himself. It was the 47th school shooting in the US so far this year; 24 of those on college campuses and 23 at schools for kindergarten-age students to senior high school. According to Colorado media, the perpetrator had been “radicalised”, and The Denver Post reported his social media accounts contained references to Holocaust denial, white supremacy and mass shootings.
Kirk’s wife, Erika (left), with US Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, on Thursday. Vance had Kirk’s body transported home on Air Force Two.Credit: AP
Political scientist Barbara Walter, an expert on violent extremism and domestic terrorism at the University of California San Diego, told CNN that ideologically driven violence had increased in the US since 2008, with the vast majority perpetrated by far-right groups – typically white nationalists or anti-government.
But if Kirk’s assassin turned out to be from the far left, it would confirm another pattern, she said. “We are starting to see an uptick from the far left … That means we’re starting, perhaps, to have a spiral effect.”
People at a vigil for Kirk in Orem, Utah.Credit: AP
There is a consensus that this is bad. In a poll of 1300 American adults conducted in late June by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion for NPR and PBS News, 73 per cent said politically motivated violence was a major problem for the US. The figure was nearly as high for Republicans (69 per cent) as for Democrats (75 per cent). Three-quarters of respondents said the problems facing the country posed a serious threat to democracy.
Political violence has always been a feature of American life, from the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King and Harvey Milk. But now, with cameras in every pocket and social media connecting every corner of the country, we see more of it than ever.
“Some measures have said the level of political violence has increased since the January 6 [2021] incident at the Capitol,” said Jonathan Katz, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
A California weapons store. Kirk’s murder is unlikely to have any bearing on US gun laws.Credit: AP
“But I think it’s more about the mediums by which people are consuming information, and the sense that perhaps the discord and the most vitriolic language is coming through social media. That feels pretty omnipresent for many Americans.
“While it’s true that we’ve had these other incidents, it does feel like a moment where it’s everywhere, and that Americans in particular are being bombarded in many, many ways by partisan rhetoric and division. And of course, there are times there are political leaders who don’t say the right things.”
The idea that social media contributes to this malaise was echoed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “It pushes people towards extremes, whether at the left or the right, and that’s not a good thing,” he said on Friday.
Cox, the Utah governor, also described social media as “a cancer on our society right now”, and urged Americans to follow Kirk’s advice from just a few months ago when he instructed followers to put their phones away and spend time with family when events seemed to be moving too fast and tempers getting too heated.
‘Americans in particular are being bombarded in many, many ways by partisan rhetoric and division.’
Jonathan Katz, Brookings Institution
Guns are the other inescapable feature of America’s political violence problem. From the attempt on Trump’s life last year, to Hortman’s murder in Minnesota, the killings of two Israeli embassy staffers on a Washington street and now Kirk’s assassination, all have a common factor – the perpetrator got their hands on a gun.
But with Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling Congress, there seems to be little sign of a reckoning on guns, even amid this maelstrom. Katz said opportunities might present themselves, but it would require a cross-party effort to find a way forward, and that needed political leadership.
Nor are Kirk’s fans clamouring for changes. Even McGettigan, who had to witness the campus shooting, dismissed the idea of stricter gun laws. “No, it hasn’t changed my opinion on that,” he said. “I’m conservative, I agree with Charlie on a lot of things.”
Rather than gun reform, McGettigan said that more careful security might be required, and high-profile individuals might need to avoid outdoor events where there were elevated and difficult-to-control areas nearby. The shooter who targeted Trump in Pennsylvania also stood on a low-rise roof.
“We need to be on our guard a lot more and consider the situations that we are putting people in,” McGettigan said.
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Appearing on CNN on Thursday night, Patti Davis – a daughter of the late former president Ronald Reagan, who survived an assassination attempt in 1981 – said when her father was shot, the mood of the country changed, and there was a suspension of politics and rancour around America.
“I felt it really viscerally,” she said. “This country kind of folded itself around us and remembered how to be compassionate, and remembered humanity over politics. And we don’t have that any more.”
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