John Ganz strikes me as a little bit lost in his own bubble a lot of the time but I appreciate his take on Charlie Kirk’s murder that there are no set of legislative or regulatory steps that the United States could feasibly take that would have prevented someone from doing to Charlie Kirk what Tyler Robinson did:

There are two reasons Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah on Wednesday: One is the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution; The other is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The simple fact is this: the only state that could guarantee that something like Kirk’s murder never occurs again would be felt, with justification, to be an intolerable tyranny by nearly everyone in this country.

Specifically, Ganz argues that the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution have created a country that simply cannot legislate its way out of this problem.

To those who say, “Guns are the issue,” I say, get real:—Charlie Kirk was killed with a bolt-action hunting rifle, not with an assault rifle. Even the most modest attempts at reasonable gun control have failed. There is no conceivable world in which there would be a powerful movement in this country to ban the types of guns that millions and millions of Americans consider to be a natural part of their lives, as normal as an automobile or a refrigerator.

And on the First Amendment:

…as long as there is freedom of speech and association in this country, there will be the spread of radical and even hateful ideas. Even if you could restrict the most incendiary speech, people will interpret relatively anodyne things in ways that drive them to violence, just because they are insane, or want attention, or are even just momentarily enraged. There is no law against irrationality, and we all must accept with a certain stoicism that there are millions of people in this country with views that border on madness. In the age of the internet, it has become nearly impossible to police the spread of propaganda.

I don’t know how Europe, Australia, the rest of the Western world, has not fallen into the same trap as the United States, a country of wild power and totally uninfringeable chaos, but I really like the quote from Douglas Hofstadter’s Reflections on Violence in the United States that Ganz includes right at the end of the post:

When one considers American history as a whole, it is hard to think of any very long period in which it could be said that the country has been consistently well governed. And yet its political system is, on the whole, a resilient and well-seasoned one, and on the strength of its history one must assume that it can summon enough talent and good will to cope with its afflictions. To cope with them—but not, I think, to master them in any thoroughly decisive or admirable fashion. The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.

"Reflections on Violence" by John Ganz