One Nation, Under Gun

On the night of April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy stood on the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis, speaking to a crowd that hadn’t yet heard the news. He had just learned that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered in Memphis. His staff begged him not to go out because there were real fears of riots, of violence, of someone taking a shot at him too. But Kennedy refused to hide.

“I have some very sad news for all of you,” he told the mostly Black crowd. “And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.”

There was a collective gasp. I remember hearing it on the radio in a friend’s car. His voice quivered, much the same way his brother Teddy’s did when he did RFK’s eulogy a few months later after he had been assassinated in Los Angeles. Kennedy continued his plea that night, though, improvising, reaching into his own grief for words that could keep the city from burning. “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred, but love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country.”

I thought him idealistic and naive, even when I was nothing more than a high school student. I had seen what was happening in our country up close, less than a year earlier. Just down the road from where I grew up, Detroit caught fire in violence and riots. Blacks were tired of high unemployment and having to fight for basic rights like voting, even after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts had become laws. There was a great awareness that nothing much had changed. RFK’s courageous request that night worked, though. While more than a hundred American cities erupted in flames, Indianapolis remained calm. Kennedy’s words, spoken by a man who himself was to soon die by a killer’s gun, were proof that courage and compassion can, for a moment, at least, defuse the violence that has defined so much of American history.

We don’t do that anymore, though. After radical right polemicist Charlie Kirk was shot dead, Trump went on the FOX Network and was asked how to heal the country’s political divide, and he replied, “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.” He redirected blame to “radicals on the left” whom he called “vicious and horrible.” The man whose job is to unify the country has also called his political opponents “scum,” judges “monsters,” and he has consistently claimed that too many immigrants are “criminals and mentally insane.” When MLK was killed, though, President Lyndon B. Johnson went on national television to urge calm. “I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King,” he said. “We can achieve nothing by violence. We can achieve everything by faith, by love, by work, and by commitment to justice.”

American political history is inextricably bound up with violence, particularly of the political variety. Through our founding Revolution, the Civil War, the labor struggles of the nineteenth century, and the long battles for civil rights, this country has repeatedly confronted its conflicts not only in ballots and legislatures but also in bullets and blood. At the center of our deadly narrative lives the disturbing fact that America has consistently destroyed its boldest, most visionary leaders. Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Guns speak our political language for us and the roll call of assassinated figures reads like a catalogue of the nation’s moral conscience, silenced just as their voices were beginning to cut through the noise of prejudice, injustice, and inequality.

We always claim to be “stunned” when killings like Charlie Kirk’s occur and we refuse to face the blunt fact that the gun has always been America’s ultimate political instrument. The republic was born in musket fire, and before it was even a nation, firearms were used to annihilate Indigenous peoples and seize their lands. Eventually, guns enforced slavery, keeping millions in chains and putting down rebellions with overwhelming violence. Every damn stage of American history is punctuated by the trigger pull. Consider the post-Civil War reconstruction massacres meant to restore white supremacy, the shooting of striking workers at the hands of Pinkertons and police, the lynch mobs that armed themselves in the name of “order.” Guns were used to hold women in subservience, to terrorize immigrants, to suppress civil rights marches.

We are stunned by political violence even though there are an estimated 400 million civilian-owed firearms in the U.S., more than the total population, more than one gun for every man, woman, and child. Those numbers almost prescribe an inevitability that violence and even death will come to divisive figures in this country. Charlie Kirk trafficked in division, xenophobia, sexism, and class warfare, and appears to have been killed by someone who thought he was not sufficiently conservative. While MLK was murdered for daring to call for equality, it is an inescapable fact for those on the right trying to lionize Kirk that he sowed the very hatred that sustains the political violence that killed him. To treat his fate as inexplicable is to misunderstand the soil from which violence grows in America. In most states, it’s easier to buy an AR-15 than it is to register to vote. We act shocked when those weapons are turned on politicians, activists, or everyday citizens. American history writes that they have always been used that way. Our arguments tend to claim guns as tools of self-defense but they are, in America, tools of political enforcement.

Guns are the punctuation mark at the end of political arguments. Don’t like Lincoln’s policies? Shoot him. Think King is moving too fast? Shoot him. Fear the Kennedys’ promise of reform? Shoot them. Don’t think Charlie Kirk is adequately conservative? Shoot him. While it is generally blasphemous to mention Kirk’s name in the same paragraph with American heroes promoting peace and equality, they all died because they expressed ideas that opponents found blasphemous and even traitorous. People in power were threatened. Charlie Kirk sowed the very hatred that sustains political violence. To treat his fate as inexplicable is to misunderstand the soil from which violence grows in this country.

The reliance on the gun to settle political disputes is not a distortion of American history, it is American history. That’s why we have mass shootings with a regularity unmatched anywhere else in the developed world. Political violence feels almost baked into our DNA. When MLK was murdered, it was because he sought to lift up the marginalized. When Kirk courted danger, it was because he sought to tear people apart. The absurdity lies not in what happened to him but in the notion that anyone should be surprised. He helped build the very environment in which political violence thrives. The distinction between Kirk and King and JFK and RFK is stark and important to repeat. The Turning Point founder preached hate and animosity, and, in my view, was not practicing politics. He was doing the moral equivalent of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, with no flame in sight.

Americans will continue to mourn without learning. Our long, bloody history of killing dissenting voices and visionaries is not likely to end. The pattern is sufficiently clear that it could be taught as arithmetic. The difference between Kirk and King is profound. But what they share is the inevitability of violence in a country where the gun is always ready, always waiting, always seen as the ultimate tool of politics. To pretend we didn’t see it coming is to close our eyes to history. We must finally admit that we’ve always known guns and hate are America’s oldest partners and we’ve not had the political will to force change so we act helpless as our democracy dies under the same sound of gunfire that rang out when it was created.

I am not stunned.