Guns of Delusion: How America's Second Amendment stubbornness took Charlie Kirk's life

W.B. Yeats’ grave has a unique epitaph: “Cast a cold eye. On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” They are the last three lines from his poem “Under Ben Bulben”, written in 1938, the year before his death.

The call-to-action, as product managers call it, is to be detached from life and death, to reject romantic memorialisation, to treat mortality with stoic acknowledgement. And yet it is almost impossible to do that when death comes knocking in America, where the gun barrel is always closer than the grave.Take Charlie Kirk, perhaps the politest Republican to stalk college campuses, who once argued that “some deaths were acceptable” to preserve the American Second Amendment, which reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”Kirk had said in 2018: “You will never live in a society with an armed citizenry and no gun deaths. That is nonsense. But I think it’s worth it.”Little did Kirk know that his own death would also become “some of the gun deaths” in service of the Second Amendment.

Guns in the American Imagination

America’s First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” — is perhaps the most democratic statement ever made, a self-fulfilling prophecy that helped make America the land of the free and the brave.

Yet its Second Amendment is so anachronistic that one wonders how it continues to exist. America’s surreal relationship with firearms has always bordered on parody. In an SNL skit, actor Walton Goggins plays a denim-clad, shades-wearing time-traveller named Matt who lectures the Founding Fathers that the amendment should guarantee “having guns.” It doesn’t sound right, so he refines it into “the right to bear arms.”

And then there was the viral 2019 tweet: “How do I kill 30–50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3–5 minutes while my small kids play?” It was written earnestly by a rural American but became an instant meme, shorthand for the absurd extremes of US.

gun logic. Twitter laughed, but feral hogs are real – they destroy crops, spread disease, and cost billions in damage. Rural gun owners argued they needed semi-automatics for protection; urban liberals mocked the imagery of toddlers being menaced by a porcine horde. America, in other words, can turn existential fear into a punchline but refuses to confront why civilians can so easily access weapons of war.And presiding over it all is the NRA, the single most effective hostage-taker in Washington.

It has ensured that even after massacres of children, the political system moves no further than “thoughts and prayers.” Money, fear, and lobbying have kept lawmakers paralysed. Even Hollywood, that citadel of self-proclaimed wokeness, has never gone after guns. Studios that will erase cigarettes, edit jokes, or insert rainbow flags will still churn out John Wick and Extraction, where firearms are fetishised like religious relics.

America lectures itself about everything but the weapon in its hand.

Stuck in 1791: An Amendment Out of Time

America’s relationship with guns is exceptional partly because of an eighteenth-century relic: the Second Amendment. Ratified in 1791, in an era of single-shot muskets and citizen militias, it made sense for a fledgling republic wary of standing armies. But today, it has become painfully anachronistic.The Founding Fathers never imagined high-capacity rifles capable of unleashing dozens of bullets in under a minute.

A soldier with a flintlock musket in Washington’s army could fire perhaps four inaccurate shots per minute. A lone gunman today can slaughter fifty in ten minutes. The technological leap is staggering – and lethal.Yet Americans remain fiercely attached to this relic, unwilling even to debate reinterpretation. Much like the presidency has swollen into the monarchy the Founders feared, the Second Amendment has metastasised into something beyond recognition.

The result is paralysis. After each fresh tragedy – a school shooting, a concert massacre, an assassination – outrage surges, vigils are held, politicians mumble platitudes, and then nothing.

Other nations faced with massacres have acted decisively: Britain after Dunblane, Australia after Port Arthur, New Zealand after Christchurch. America clings to 1791 like scripture, as though muskets were still the pinnacle of warfare.

“Worth It”: Guns and the MAGA Mindset

For conservatives, guns are not tools but totems. They are framed as God-given rights, safeguards against tyranny, a talisman from 1776. Kirk’s words distilled the creed perfectly: freedom isn’t free, and blood is the price. In their worldview, the Second Amendment guarantees every other right – a cosmic insurance policy against state overreach.The irony is impossible to miss. Kirk’s own life was taken by a bullet at one of his campus events, while he was answering a question on gun violence.

In that instant, the abstract “cost” became brutally personal. He believed armed citizens made for a safer society; yet all his politeness, all his rhetoric, all the armed security nearby could not save him from a single determined shooter.

Haunted by Gun Deaths Like No Other Country

The toll of this paralysis is staggering. In 2023, 46,728 people in the US died from gun-related injuries — the highest total in decades. Of those deaths, about 58% were suicides (roughly 27,300 people), while homicides accounted for about 38% (nearly 17,900).Firearms have now become the leading cause of death for American children and teens, surpassing car crashes and cancer. In 2023, the firearm death rate among children and adolescents was about 3.5 per 100,000, a sharp increase from earlier years. From 2019 to 2023, deaths in this age group rose by roughly 46%, driven largely by assaults.Mass shootings are routine.The US regularly records more shootings than days in the year.

Columbine, Sandy Hook, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland, Buffalo, Uvalde – each once a national wound, now just another tally. American schoolchildren grow up with “active shooter” drills as a normal part of education, rehearsing how to hide in closets and smear blood on themselves to play dead. In most countries, such trauma would define a generation. In America, it defines Tuesdays.Political violence has blurred into the mix. Kirk’s assassination was indiscriminate – an extremist act without neat partisan boundaries.

Once violence is unleashed, it devours both sides. Conservatives who dismissed gun violence as someone else’s problem now face the truth: bullets do not check political leanings.

Hard Truths and Simple Answers

Yeats implored us to “pass by” life’s sorrows with a cold, distant eye. America probably will, because nothing seems to move the needle on guns.Charlie Kirk’s death, and the irony of his own words, ought to demand reckoning. Other nations have shown that fewer guns mean fewer deaths.

It is not complicated. But America insists on dressing simplicity in the costume of freedom. Kirk once said gun deaths were “worth it.” Perhaps, like Yeats’ epitaph, those words will follow him. Yeats asked us to cast a cold eye on life and death. America prays, drowning in grief after every incident, but refuses to accept the simple truth: fewer guns will mean fewer deaths. That arithmetic is too much for a nation addicted to tragedy. Kirk had once argued that American campuses were no longer safe for people who held non-liberal views.

He was right, when it came to debate. But it was the nation’s obstinacy that ultimately took a bright young man’s life. And in any sane nation, that shouldn’t be worth it.