On Wednesday night, Spanish time, two videos recorded on an American campus began to go viral. Specifically that of Utah Valley Universitylocated a few kilometers from Salt Lake City. In both you could see the young conservative activist Charlie Kirk speaking before thousands of people with a microphone in his hand seconds before being killed by a shooter stationed on the roof of a nearby building.
Kirk’s death was confirmed an hour after the incident by himself. Donald Trumpwho had a very good relationship with the activist, and by his representative. Kirk, founder of the powerful conservative youth organization Turning Point USA and one of the most important figures in the Trumpist ecosystem, leaves behind a wife, a son and a daughter. He was 31 years old.
As for the shooter, his identity and, therefore, his motives are still unknown. This has not prevented, however, a large part of the American right, led by Trump himself, from blaming the left for what happened.
“For years the radical left has compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump declared in a video message shortly after confirming Kirk’s death. “This type of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we witness in our country today and must stop immediately,” he added.
“My administration will find each and every person who contributed to this atrocity and other acts of political violence, including the organizations that finance and support it.”
“The last time the radical left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover [director del FBI entre 1935 y 1972] “he silenced her completely in a matter of years,” wrote the influential conservative activist. Christopher Rufo. “It is time, within the framework of the law, to infiltrate, dismantle, arrest and imprison all those responsible for this chaos.”
It is true that the United States has been immersed in a spiral of political violence for some time that does not bode well. But this spiral has left victims of all ideologies. Not just conservative or right-aligned.
“We can’t let what happened yesterday be the norm”: House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who survived a politically-motivated attack when he was shot at a congressional baseball practice in 2017, called the assassination of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday “a sad loss for our country.”… pic.twitter.com/LRPEmAoMri
— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) September 11, 2025
A worrying trend
Just last year Capitol Police – a force in charge of ensuring the safety of members of Congress – detected some 9,500 threats or “concerning statements” against their protected people, their families or attached staff. For comparison: the previous year –2023– 8,000 threats were detected. And in 2017 that number did not reach 4,000 threats.
Precisely, it was in 2017 when a shooting occurred against several members of the Republican Party in Virginia seriously injuring the congressman Steve Scalise. The shooter, a 66-year-old left-wing activist, was killed during the incident.
That was the first attempt to assassinate a member of the United States Congress since 2011, when a congresswoman from the Democratic Party call Gabrielle Giffords She was seriously injured after being shot in the head while participating in an event in Arizona. The perpetrator, who that morning killed six people and injured thirteen others, did not seem to have a defined political ideology; He was a great consumer, of course, of conspiracy theories and deeply distrusted the Government.
However, since the 2017 shooting in Virginia, episodes of violence expressly directed against political representatives of the State have multiplied.
In October 2020, for example, the FBI arrested thirteen people linked to a militia called Wolverine Watchmen while they were planning the kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmerthe governor of Michigan and one of the most prominent personalities of the Democratic Party.
Months after that, in January 2021, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol with the intention of stopping the appointment of Joe Biden as president of the United States alleging that “electoral fraud” was being committed.
Among those who attacked the building were members of far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and members of anti-government militias such as Oath Keepers. It is estimated that, between those who died that day and those who committed suicide during the following months because of what happened that day, the assault on the Capitol left nine dead.
A year and a half after those events, in October 2022, a person entered the residence of Nancy Pelosiwho was then speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and attacked her husband with a hammer: Paul Pelosi. As the police learned when they arrested the aggressor, a right-winger named David DePapehis objective was to kidnap Nancy Pelosi to “interrogate” her.
And last summer the victim was Trump himself when, first in July and then in September, he suffered two assassination attempts.
The first was the most serious since the shooter who intended to kill him – a young man named Thomas Matthew Crooks with no known political affiliation – managed to pull the trigger and graze the ear of the then presidential candidate, who was in Pennsylvania giving a rally that day. Before being shot, Crooks killed a member of the public named Corey Comperatore and seriously injured two other assistants.
The second attempt was not completed because the agents of the Secret service they managed to spot Ryan Wesley Routh hidden in the weeds of a Florida golf course before he had Trump within range. At the time of the assassination attempt, Routh, a Democratic Party voter until 2012, had been alarming his acquaintances for some time due to his visceral and erratic behavior. To the point that at least one of those people would have informed the FBI of its existence.
Since then, that is, in the last year, the world’s leading economy has witnessed the attack on the building of the Democratic National Committee in Arizona; has witnessed the attack on the Republican Party headquarters in New Mexico; has seen how the Pennsylvania governor’s house –Josh Shapiro; another of the most important figures in the Democratic Party – was burning due to a firebomb attack; has witnessed the murder of two employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington; has seen how a march in support of the Israeli hostages still in the hands of the Israelis was attacked with firebombs in Colorado. Hamas; and has been horrified by the shooting of two Democratic Party legislators –Melissa Hortman y John Hoffman– and their spouses in Minnesota.
También hay quien incluye en esa lista el asesinato de Brian Thompson, el consejero delegado de la aseguradora médica UnitedHealthcare, cometido por un joven llamado Luigi Mangione en Manhattan el pasado mes de diciembre. Según aseguró posteriormente Mangione, su decisión de matar a Thompson respondía a que “esos parásitos [una alusión al sector de las aseguradoras médicas] “They have earned it.”
Although the expressions of condemnation after Thompson’s death occurred among the country’s political elites, many people in the United States and elsewhere sympathized – and sympathize – with what Mangione did.
Beyond all of the above, judges and prosecutors are also targeted. If we take the year 2021 as a reference, it can be stated that threats against federal magistrates have doubled to reach 457 in 2023, according to data managed by the Marshals Service.
It is not surprising, therefore, that 73% of Americans consider political violence as one of the most serious problems in the country, according to a recent survey carried out by Marist.
“Not if it is limited to just one tender”
“Political violence is contagious, it is spreading, and it is not limited to a single side or belief system,” he commented. Ezra Kleinone of the most important columnists of the New York Timesthis Thursday. “The basis of a free society is the ability to participate in it without fear of violence; political violence is always an attack against all of us and you have to be very blind not to see it,” added the commentator. before sentencing: “It should terrify us all.”
“I shouldn’t have to say how bad this is for our nation,” explained for his part the popular economist Noah Smith. Someone quite famous on the other side of the pond for relating economics to politics and for debating at length about the American drift.
“I still think the probability of a true American civil war is relatively low… but if it happens it won’t be gun battles on an empty field like last time,” he wrote in his newsletter Smith echoing observers who predict a civil conflict in the United States at a more recent date than desirable.
“It will be more like the Spanish Civil War: with neighbors fighting neighbors, rampant atrocities on both sides, and an impoverished nation for many years.”
Smith continued his reflection as follows: “Even assuming that we manage to avoid this worst-case scenario, it is possible that the United States will suffer a prolonged period of elevated political violence similar to the Years of lead in Italy or Troubles in Northern Ireland.
And he ended by saying: “With ordinary Americans too exhausted to take back their country, the political arena could be dominated for the next ten or twenty years by people who do nothing but spread hate memes, incited by the enemies of the United States and by the worst villains in our society.”
A country with more weapons than people
As usually happens in these cases, the murder of Charlie Kirk has also placed part of the focus on the debate around firearms and the famous Second Amendment that allows them to be carried.
It must be remembered that according to the observatory Small Arms Surveybased in Geneva, there are approximately 395 million firearms in the hands of civilians in the United States. A figure that, if distributed equitably, amounts to 120 firearms per hundred inhabitants.
Which means that the United States is the only country in the world – of those with a record – in which the number of firearms exceeds the number of inhabitants. Furthermore, the trend is growing since, based on the latest data, it appears that firearm ownership has grown since the pandemic. Also among women.
According to some experts, the explanation for this rise is found in the fear that populates the minds of American society. A fear that, as happens with political violence, continues to increase.