As RFK said after MLK’s death, we must choose between “violence and non-violence, between lawlessness and love.” His call for unity and rejecting hatred feels as urgent now as it was then.
Violence is never the answer. But understanding these tragic patterns might help us navigate our current moment with hopefully more empathy.
Political violence, especially deadly violence is not ok. But comparing Charlie Kirk to MLK is also not ok.
Tradeoffs between rights and safety are always made. I interpret "some gun deaths are ok" as to mean that they are inherently dangerous, and that seeking 0 accidental deaths is too high of a standard for something to be allowed. And we don't hold other parts of daily life to this standard, like vehicles or medicine. If you want to get into degrees, that's fine, but a blanket shutdown on the sentence doesn't do that.
If it were upto me, we wouldn’t have such a car dependent culture. It is absolutely possible to invest in public transportation/multimodal transport and reduce this number significantly.
But to middle class snobs who think they're morally above it all, such dirtiness is a reality they can wave away with a dismissive comment of superiority, safe from all that messiness, in their nice suburb homes.
So long as they intentionally ignore these lower class facts that some wrongdoers exist who can literally only be stopped by deadly force, they can continue to put their chins up and lament the inferior-to-them simpletons who think guns have to be a thing, in between taking long savouring sniffs of their excrement after every bathroom visit.
Police worldwide, where guns are usually illegal, are usually armed.