Charlie Kirk’s Murder Illustrates How the Second Amendment Is Swallowing the First

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The assassination of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday fueled an immediate, vicious explosion of recrimination^[2] on the political right, with leaders, including President DonaldTrump, accusing progressives of inciting, stoking, and acting on^[3] political violence against innocent conservatives. In truth, the alleged assassin, apprehended on Friday in Utah, has motives that remain unknown^[4]. According to early reports, though, these views cannot be characterized as leftist by any metric. Even before a suspect was apprehended, most prominent liberals reacted with horror, unequivocally^[5] condemning^[6] the murder and, if anything, participating in a national effort to honor^[7] and celebrate^[8] Kirk’s work. But the race to blame the left for Kirk’s killing obscures a deeper dynamic at play across all political assassinations in the United States: Easy access to weapons of war threatens free speech, allowing gunmen to chill public debate through violence and intimidation. When Americans across the political spectrum fear for their safety, they cannot possibly speak or assemble freely—and the open debate that sustains democracy itself begins to collapse under the weight of fearful silence.

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus^[9], co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed how ever-expanding Second Amendment rights continue to imperil First Amendment freedoms. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: I find the public-facing discourse around shootings to be impoverished, dangerous, and a powder keg on its own terms. We should talk about Charlie Kirk, the First Amendment, and the Second Amendment. But the discourse of the last couple of days has felt really poisonous to me, no matter how you frame it. 

Mark Joseph Stern: I certainly agree. Donald Trump immediately seized upon this to vilify the left,^[10] when he didn’t know any facts, and it was dangerous and cynical. We’ve seen this throughout the right-wing ecosystem, with commentators leaping to frame this as proof that the left uses political violence to suppress the views of the right—even though in reality, it appears that political assassinations are more frequently committed^[11] by right-wing extremists^[12] than left-wing extremists.

But I don’t think now is the time to point fingers either way. I just want to make the neutral point that the Second Amendment continues to swallow up the First Amendment—that the omnipresent threat of gun violence in the United States continues to act as de facto censorship on the free exchange of ideas. People are understandably afraid to speak their minds in public. They are afraid to appear in the public arena and say something that might be controversial, or really to say anything at all, because it is outrageously easy for people to obtain firearms in this country. And so it is outrageously easy for someone who doesn’t like you—for political reasons, or moral reasons, or insane reasons—to go out, get a gun, and shoot you. A while ago, I wrote^[13] that “the only reason you have not been shot is because nobody has yet decided to shoot you.” That remains tragically true today.

This also goes back to something we first wrote^[15] after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” tragedy, when we talked about how the presence of guns in that demonstration fundamentally changed the nature of the march. The weapons acted as their own kind of intimidation and violent censorship of counterprotesters, and made the march not a First Amendment exercise, but a show of force against those who would oppose it. The Charlie Kirk assassination flips the ideological balance, but it’s a similar problem where we see that a person with a gun can fundamentally alter our ability to hold debates and have a free exchange of ideas and arguments. Because they can shut it all down by murdering the person they disagree with. And so it is yet another example of how the courts’ embrace of nearly unrestricted access to firearms is impoverishing our public debate by making people too scared to engage in that debate because they don’t want to be killed.

We’re already seeing abject terror in government in the wake of the assassination. Within 24 hours, we’re seeing lawmakers afraid to go to their workplaces. We are continuing this theme that we’ve talked about for a long time: How can you possibly have a role in public life when you are only as safe as the person who doesn’t want to shoot you that day allows you to be? We’ve seen it for a long time affecting how Republicans treat Donald Trump; they’re afraid to vote for his impeachment because they want their children to be safe. But I think that, in a world of vigilantism and stochastic terror, it is not just bad for speech qua speech, but for governance qua governance. Lawmakers are afraid to go to their own place of work, to go to their town halls and perform all the hallmarks of what it is to participate in government. ^[16][17][18]

And that is a rational choice in this culture. It is a rational choice for every one of my friends who has a public-facing life who came away this week saying: I don’t think I can ever go to a college campus again. Or: Can I continue to go speak in red states where people are publicly carrying guns? And we have to think carefully about how that creeps into the world of what we think of as free speech, and what we think of as public policy and governance itself. I’ll also note that there was an uptick in bomb threats to HBCUs in the days following Kirk’s murder. You can’t attribute that to this episode, but it’s a reminder that it’s not just the lone speaker whose speech is encroached upon by the predatory effect of violence. The places that are heaviest hit are so often the most vulnerable institutions. It feels like a one-way ratchet, and it’s hard to see how this reverses. ^[19]

Yes, and the courts are actively making this worse. The courts are supposed to be protecting our free speech, but instead they’re striking down more and more^[24] restrictions on public carry. And this is something that many foresaw when the Supreme Court established a Second Amendment right to public carry in the 2022 Bruen decision^[25]. The New York ACLU filed an amicus brief^[26] in that case warning that allowing people to carry guns in public will act as censorship on public debate. Our friend Perry Grossman co-authored that brief and wrote that “one especially important justification” for public carry restrictions is that they “facilitate civic engagement, by promoting safety and reducing the chances that the disagreements inevitable in a robust democracy do not lead to lethal violence.”

Those words were unheeded at the Supreme Court then, and are still unheeded by many judges now, but I fear they were prophetic. We continue to see the consequences of loose gun laws in this country actually impoverishing public debate. And acknowledging that we don’t have the full facts of this shooting, the overall trend line is clear: Guns are making our speech less free.

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