This is an opinion column.

I waited. There was so, so much to say. Yet I waited.

I waited, in part, because I was on vacation at the time. That gave me a cushion — time to absorb and reflect on a shocking, awful tragedy. To digest an atrocity. To lament yet another horrific gun death in America. Yet another national stain.

It initially crossed my news feed that a “conservative speaker” had been shot in Utah. Then my wife, sitting nearby and looking at her phone, read the name: “Charlie Kirk.”

“Damn,” I said. “Him?”

A few minutes later, I learned Kirk had died. Damn.

This past Sunday, Kirk was memorialized.

The killing of the 31-year-old conservative provocateur — the pied piper of the young right — is condemnable from any perspective. No one should endure this fate. No one should di

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