I Was Supposed to Debate Charlie Kirk. Here’s What I Would Have Said.

Opinion|I Was Supposed to Debate Charlie Kirk. Here’s What I Would Have Said.

In less than two weeks, I was supposed to debate Charlie Kirk.

The event was scheduled for Sept. 25 at Dartmouth College, and it was meant to be a wide-ranging conversation about American politics, focused on the views of young voters.

But on Wednesday, tragedy intervened. The entire country now knows the story: Mr. Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at a university campus in Utah. Late Thursday night, an arrest was made in the case.

I found out that Mr. Kirk had been killed while I was livestreaming to my audience on Twitch, as I do nearly every day. While I am exposed daily to images of incredible horror, particularly those of atrocities taking place in Gaza, I was still shocked by the images from Utah.

What shocked me was not merely the graphic nature of what took place. It was the horror of seeing someone whom I know — not a friend or an ally, but a human being I know personally and have debated before — fall victim to what clearly seems to be a rising tide of political violence.

Even before knowing exactly why Mr. Kirk was killed, I think there are some disturbing and necessary insights that can be drawn from his horrible death, ideas that affect the way many of my viewers — and many of the people who followed Mr. Kirk — see the world.

The first of these insights is hardly new. The United States has both very loose gun laws and more violent gun deaths per capita than any other developed nation in the world. And while shootings occur most anywhere, campuses can be especially deadly. As news broke that Mr. Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, there was a near-simultaneous tragedy at a high school in small-town Colorado, where a 16-year-old shot two fellow students. There have been 47 school shootings this year.