When someone plots to assassinate you, they want more than your death.

They want to silence or remove you, to cause pain to your friends and loved ones. They may want revenge, or some hate-warped concept of justice.

Assassinations are more than just calculated murder.

Wednesday’s fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah, at a moment when hundreds of students’ cellphone cameras were pointed at him, is about destabilization.

If the goal was to disturb, disrupt and further divide our republic, the gunman succeeded.

No matter the motivation, in the chaotic, whirling top of American political life, Kirk’s violent death may be the thing that irretrievably knocks it all over.

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Jul 14, 2024

I understand assassination. In 2018, my name and photo were atop the death list of a man who stormed the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis and killed five of my friends.

Over the next three years, my surviving colleagues and I explored the mind of the man convicted of those murders. Alex Mann, now at The Banner with me, helped explain — if that’s possible — what this man wanted.

Angered by a 2011 column about his conviction for harassment in the still-new era of social media, he wanted to silence us. He tried to destabilize the newspaper so it would collapse under an avalanche of chaos, recriminations and pain.

He failed.

President Donald Trump and his league of right-wing influencers have done nothing to keep Kirk’s killer from achieving the same result for America, leaping immediately to blame the political left.

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,“ the president said Wednesday night. ”This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Without evidence, before Friday’s arrest, the president of the United States tried to convict his political opponents of assassination in the court of public opinion.

There are people on the political right offering a more measured response.

“Please join me in praying for Charlie Kirk,” U.S. Rep. Andy Harris wrote on X. “Such abhorrent political violence must stop plaguing our nation.”

For every word of reason, there is a louder voice, a gallon more of gas on the bonfire of America. Conservative provocateurs accused people who disagreed with Kirk of celebrating his death.

“The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform X hours after Kirk was shot.

There undoubtedly are fools who see this as a good thing, or as a case of reaping the whirlwind. Kirk was a professional agitator who spread divisive ideas about race, gender and immigration under the banner of free speech.

Harris, a Maryland Republican not known as someone who listens to those who disagree, quickly set aside his call for unity in prayer to politicize Kirk’s murder. On Friday, he added his voice to the howling, blame the libs!

“I joined several of my colleagues in calling for a select committee to investigate the radical left’s coordinated campaign against America and the rule of law,” he wrote on X.

The arrest of Tyler Robinson, hopefully, will cool some of the ardor for accusations.

Our hearts should ache for the 31-year-old Kirk, his family and his friends.

The indefensible actions of a shooter unbalanced by Kirk’s vitriol — if that’s what this was — are not justification to threaten retribution. Both are symptoms of our insanity.

Assassinations are abhorrent. It’s how they bend the arc of history that affect us all.

If Abraham Lincoln had lived beyond 1865, would the American South have been rebuilt in the image of Jim Crow?

If Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife had survived in 1914, would 20 million people have died in World War I, and set the stage for 80 million more in World War II?

Was America’s conspiracy-driven paranoia planted by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in five short years?

There’s no way to know if Kirk’s death by a sniper’s bullet will be a junction in the sweep of time. His angry elevation to conservative martyrdom is a gravestone on the road to an American dissolution.

Jan. 6 in Washington. Trump in western Pennsylvania. Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in California. Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Health insurance executive Brian Thompson in New York City.

And now, Charlie Kirk in Utah.

It’s a litany of political violence, plotted or executed, and after each new shock, one side blames the rhetoric of the other for the outrage, and the outrage glows hotter.

There will be more.

Please show me a sign that Kirk’s death will make us step back from what we’re doing to ourselves.

I wish more of this conversation were about the culture of guns arming our warring factions, or how people considering political violence can be talked out of it by friends and family.

Instead, we call someone, as Kirk did, a disgusting, mentally ill, neurotic, predatory freak. We call someone, as he was called, a Nazi, a fascist.

Abduct someone. Terrify someone. Assassinate someone.

Share the video. Spew the vile thoughts for likes and retweets. Blame the media. Blame the other side.

If prayer helps you, pray that this cycle of violence ends with Charlie Kirk. It can’t hurt.

My experience is that God or karma or the universe gives you what you work for far more often than an answer to your prayers.