A memorial for Charlie Kirk at the Turning Point Turning Point USA headquarters in Phoenix on Sept. 11, 2025.

On Sept. 10, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed in front of a large audience of college students in Orem, Utah. A coward with a bolt action rifle shot the 31-year-old from what university officials believed to be 200 yards away.

At the time I am writing this, we don’t know a ton about Kirk’s killing, but that hasn’t stopped plenty on the left from victim blaming and using his death to advance their own political message.

It's been horrible and infuriating to watch how quickly the hateful messages became a social media flurry.

Left-wing activists blame Charlie Kirk for his own death

I’ve seen countless instances of the following Kirk quote circulating online:

“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,” Kirk once said in an interview.

These words have been plastered on social media platforms by gun control advocates following his death, amassing hundreds of thousands of shares and likes. The implication is that Kirk deserves what happened to him, or that it is the result of policies he advocated for, and thus, he should be grieved less.

Kirk’s words are obviously right to anybody who supports the Second Amendment, but even if I disagreed, I would have the basic decency not to treat his death as an “I told you so” moment. It is utterly repulsive that some people itch to use an assassination as a moment to claim victory in a political debate.

Nor do I think that Kirk, who cofounded Turning Point USA, would disagree with that statement, even knowing what would eventually happen to him. The tricky thing about being a principled person is that people eventually will use those principles against you when something adversely impacts you.

Elected officials use his death for politics

I must mention the unified front that elected Democrats have had in condemning this horrific action, and it deserves praise.

However, there have been some issues. Plenty have used this as a chance to advocate for their own preferred sets of gun control policy, way before we have any of the facts on the ground.

“I don’t think a single person who has dedicated their entire career to preventing gun safety legislation from getting passed in this House has any right to blame anybody else but themselves for what is happening,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, on Sept. 11.

I understand Ocasio-Cortez's instinct to turn around the situation on Republicans, who are saying her party had a role in prompting the shooting, but she is still wrong to do so. There is no set of gun control proposals that would have saved Kirk. A coward with a bolt action rifle took a single shot from up to 200 yards away?

Previous Democratic gun control proposals have targeted so-called assault weapons, chiefly the AR-15. The type of weapon used to kill Kirk is precisely the type of weapon that gun control advocates have insisted they don’t want to take.

Short of a blanket ban on all firearms, I’m not sure what kind of legislation anyone thinks might have prevented this tragedy.

Those who claim Kirk’s death was because of inadequate gun control show their true face. They don’t support nuanced gun restrictions or even the removal of certain guns from society. The truth is that they want them all gone, and they have no problem using a young father's death to advance that position.

Nothing has made me angrier than seeing reactions blaming Kirk for the fact that a waste of space killed him while he had no opportunity to defend himself. It is sickening that some can't set aside their political obsessions for a day to grieve the violent, senseless death of a young husband and father. Shame on AOC and the others who have done so.

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why are Democrats rushing to blame Charlie Kirk for his death? It's infuriating. | Opinion

Reporting by Dace Potas, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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