LETTER: Charlie Kirk and encouraging debate
September 20, 2025 - 9:00 pm
Perhaps a fitting legacy for Charlie Kirk would be for our society to have an increase in civil debates and a decrease in protesters marching and holding signs or podcasters spewing their unchallenged opinions. I disagree with almost everything he espoused, but I applaud the manner in which he approached his adversaries. Talk, debate, and exchange ideas. That is how you change hearts and minds, by reasoned discourse.
Proclaiming one of his beliefs, he said that “I think it’s worth it 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 might rethink that position if he were alive today.
Mr. Kirk’s murder was wrong, just like the murder of thousands of innocent children and adults attending school, a movie, a concert, nightclub or church service, killed by gun violence in the past 10 years, by a nut or zealot with a gun that he shouldn’t have had access to. Kirk’s death, while tragic is not, unfortunately, exceptional.