One Gen-Z Verdict on Charlie Kirk

Wednesday, September 10th in my teenaged, high-school life was a day marked by teenaged, high school things. A quiz in Spanish, a cross country meet, a new episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty; and upon opening my Instagram feed, first whiplash, then disbelief, then the sudden urge to text everyone within the acquaintance-to-friend-spectrum radius that Charlie Kirk, the Republican leader of Turning Point that debated college students and admitted he wouldn’t allow his nine-year-old daughter to get an abortion if she was pregnant by rape, was dead. Shot fatally to the neck at a Utah campus event, after answering a question about U.S. mass shooters and gun violence. At the time I Googled it, Charlie Kirk’s Wikipedia page was updated five minutes before to complete the en-dash that was in parentheses next to his name—the date of death, unbelievably, September 10th, 2025.

Social media was quick to the buzz—I clicked through several of my friends’ Instagram stories all referencing what happened. One was a black background with a paragraph of text, praying for the victims of senseless gun violence, calling for reform. Another was a picture of Charlie Kirk and three clapping emojis next to his shoulder, some reposted Twitter thread about the deaths in Palestine compared to this, and a second part conceding sympathy to his family but also, at the end of the day, “a nazi is dead.” I also saw the usual, figure skating videos and club flyers for meetings happening soon. My feed was the whirlwind that mirrored the internal chaos I was feeling. I briefly recalled the times when I’d often see Instagram Reels of Kirk “shut down by Oxford student,” or a clip of one of his racist or sexist or transphobic or xenophobic remarks debunked by an Instagram expert from Talking Head university—and still, did not know how to feel. My APUSH teacher told us that he still remembered where he was and what he was doing when 9/11 happened—at his friend’s house watching the TV. This, in a sense, felt like that, and dimly, I wondered what was next.

For me, the first immediate thought was a sense of bitter, twisted irony. Just hours before, I had been sitting in my AP Lang classroom, answering a question about patriotism and jingoism and planning to write my weekly blog post on my conflicting views on America as an Asian-American. And now a “political assassination” right on my doorstep as I got home from cross country. I still texted furiously in the group chat about our next 5 a.m. running practice, and I still watched The Summer I Turned Pretty on YouTube when I should have been reviewing for Calculus. And who knows what new updates and news commentary videos flooded Instagram and TikTok in that time.

But I am a high school student in America, and that means I am no stranger to the topic of guns. Even if I have never seen one except on the Safe-Eds at school and strapped to the police officers who deliver our drug PSAs, I know them from the school shooting drills during 5th hour that interrupt our test, the “dark” jokes that slip into our conversation that my English teacher would call “understatement” or “minimizing” or “irony,” and the 2000-word paper I wrote in AP Seminar last year about the desensitization of school shootings. Rumors of a student expelled for texting shooting plans in the group chat. My APUSH teacher quizzing us on the four presidents who were assassinated, counting them on his fingers as we rattled them off one by one. Just today, our cross country team competed at Oxford High School for a meet, where four students were killed in a shooting four years ago.

Being a teenager in America means dark humor about school shootings one day, the next posting an Instagram Story sending prayers to Denver or Minneapolis or whatever place won the doom lottery to earn two days worth of coverage on the national news, and the next scrambling an essay in English about gun violence in the United States ending with a call for “stricter regulation and enforcement.” It is easy now, I think, to smile sardonically at the Charlie Kirk situation, or at the very least be tempted to. Finger-pointing and yelling “karma, b*tch” is always a sadistic, but nonetheless vindicating, thrill. And we as teenagers are no strangers to gun violence, or finger-pointing on the Internet, or our fellow comrades as casualties testing the hypothesis of just how much bodyweight it will take for the scales to tip.

And patriotism in the teenage mind is an interesting thing. Too progressive to take Christopher Columbus, the genocidist, or John Smith, the pedophile and the rapist, or John F. Kennedy, the womanizer, seriously; too nonchalant for the Pledge of Allegiance over the morning announcements; yet also too preoccupied with school and college stress to actually care about anything. I would know, as the political spoilsport in my friend groups, and the daughter to Chinese immigrants whose rule of thumb is “if it doesn’t affect us, and it won’t.” As someone who was spurred by an Instagram Reel to leave a voicemail for my state Senator about defunding public media. There is only so much use a hotheaded youth who read some articles once or twice is to the Real World. On the other hand, there is only so much civic ignorance that can be tolerated in the youth population before society, rots.

But the teens have given their verdict, an orange “Gun Violence Spares No One” post passed around the holy archive of the Instagram Story. At the same time, with both Democrat and Republican politicans, congressional representatives and ordinary citizens all speaking out in a more-or-less unified voice sending prayers to Kirk’s family and denouncing political violence, we seem to be in a phase of unity as rare and refreshing as it is bizarre. I am reminded of “The Partly Cloudy Patriot” by Sarah Vowell and the wave of renewed patriotism she describes in the aftermath of 9/11—from pop culture, to Halloween costume stores to the flag draped over patriotism’s kingdom of everywhere the light touches. I am reminded of a YouTube short where two Americans debating health insurance in the U.S. and played by the same YouTuber dropped their argument to mock a random British person, also played by the same YouTuber, for their fish n’ chips and losing the American Revolution recently in 1783. Maybe this time American Internet unity will prove to be more than a hoax and beat the status of Coldplay-gate as the first time this has happened this year. In a time where America is more divided than ever, though this statement has not been disproven since 1776, maybe the fall of a man with every Internet-cancellable sin under the sun to his name will be the sacrifice necessary to make the adjective on the U.S.’s birth certificate more than decorative nonsense.

It is now 12 a.m., September 11th, 2025, the day of my first Calculus quiz, AP Lang text discussion and the thousand other things that make up my teenage, high-school life. I wonder if Charlie Kirk will come up in English or my newspaper class. I wonder if I’ll hear it talked about in the hallways passing from door to door, or in line at lunch, or in afternoon chatter on the bus ride home. I wonder what my cross country friend will say when I continue to be the current-events killjoy on our mile run, but that this time it might actually matter and the inertia might propel us forward instead of freezing us in stagnation. That in truth every time has mattered—any moment will. Maybe in some future or parallel universe there is a version of me pressing my hand to my heart and being the first in first hour to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in more than a whisper. Maybe one day, this was just the beginning.