The Death Penalty, Gun Violence, & Trans Discrimination
All three issues come together in the saga of Charlie Kirk. Plus, the political nature of the Olympics.
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: Who among us can honestly claim enough certainty to decide when another person’s life should end?
Trump Administration Guts Efforts to Prevent Gun Violence: The bloodshed doesn’t disappear just because the paperwork does.
Trans People Are Fleeing Red States for Seattle, Which Can’t Keep Up: When Americans have to seek refuge from their own government, we’re no longer debating policy so much as measuring cruelty.
Olympic Committee Clears Path for Russia to Return to Games: The IOC wants the appearance of principle without the inconvenience.
Death By Lightning | Matt Ross (2025) - Netflix: I’m always drawn to stories about history’s fragile hinge points, and this one is a reminder of how much a nation can lose in a single violent moment.
Bettye LaVette | “Things Have Changed (2018): A late-blooming soul singer takes on the “Voice of His Generation” with a voice, and a mind, of her own.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Fellowship of the Ring
Every so often, when a high-profile case is in the news, I find myself thinking about capital punishment, and it’s never a satisfying exercise. This week, it was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the trial of his alleged assassin, that had me thinking about the death penalty. From all I’ve read, it seems like an open and shut case of premeditated murder. But when I look at the accused killer, Tyler Robinson, I don’t see an assassin. I see a confused young man who, by all accounts, existed more online than in the real world; and that is a dangerous place to live. Online, there are rarely consequences associated with our actions, and violence can seem like an abstraction. The difference between right and wrong can seem like a matter of personal choice rather than societal agreement. And the difference between violent rhetoric and actual violence can begin to seem ephemeral, when in fact nothing in this world is more concrete.
One thing we know about the death penalty in America is that it is a form of “justice” that is anything but blind. According to the ACLU (and yes, I am a card-carrying member), cases in which a Black man kills a white person are as much as twenty times more likely to result in the death penalty than cases in which the killer is white and the victim is Black. That’s not an issue in this case. But there are other factors that will play into the likelihood of a sentence of death, in particular the fact that, among a certain, conservative segment of the population, Kirk was a beloved icon, while Robinson’s motive seems to have been tied to his relationship with his trans partner. The trial is taking place in Utah, which is a conservative state, and not one known to be accommodating to the trans community. That should be beside the point, but forgive me if I lack faith that it will be.
But even absent issues of politics and bias, I come back to a more fundamental question, which is the one Tolkien was getting at: what gives any of us the standing to decide that another person’s story is finished? Gandalf’s warning to Frodo carries weight well beyond wizards and hobbits, landing squarely on the appetite we all carry for certainty, the itch to sort people into categories of deserving and undeserving without considering the whole context and hearing the whole story. Yet history keeps handing us the same lesson on repeat: the people we were sure deserved condemnation reveal layers the verdict never accounted for, and the people we dismissed prove us wrong. I used to believe having a fast, strong opinion was a sign of conviction. Age, and a fair amount of time spent reading and writing about history, taught me something closer to the opposite. Hesitation is the only honest response available when the information in front of you is incomplete. And the information in front of you is always incomplete.
There’s a real difference between judging an action and pronouncing a person’s entire worth, and it matters which one we’re doing. We have to judge actions constantly, that’s how families, workplaces, and whole societies manage to function without collapsing into chaos. The leap Tolkien/Gandalf warns against is the one from “this was wrong” to “this person deserves annihilation.” That leap almost never relies on the whole story, but once we’ve made it, we can’t walk it back.
So why do we keep making it anyway? Mostly because certainty is comfortable. A fast verdict gives you a clean story, a villain, a tidy resolution, and clean stories are satisfying in a world that rarely offers them. There’s something self-flattering buried in there too. Deciding who deserves condemnation lets us stand on the other side of that line, among the deserving, without ever worrying about our own actions, our own thoughts, our own circumstances. Everybody today is incentivized to skip past caution and go straight to the verdict, because hesitation reads as weakness in a culture obsessed with looking decisive.
Consider how many people convicted decades ago walked free once DNA evidence finally caught up with their cases, years after a jury felt completely certain of their guilt. That’s the sharpest possible illustration of what happens when we’re too eager to deal out judgement: time we can never return, taken from people who never should have lost it.
Writing someone off entirely because of a single moment, a single mistake, a single irrational thought, has become close to a national pastime. We’ve built entire platforms around that habit, and I include myself among the users. In point of fact, assuming he’s guilty, it’s very close to what Tyler Robinson did to Charlie Kirk; perhaps he didn’t write him off over a single issue, but he certainly didn’t know the whole man. Perhaps he despised what Kirk stood for and wanted to punish not only the man but the people who celebrated him. But what about the people who actually knew him: his wife and children and anyone else who knew the man rather than the public figure, and loved the parts of him the rest of us knew nothing about? Tyler Robinson destroyed Charlie Kirk and destroyed a large part of those people as well. Is that what society should do to the people who love Tyler Robinson?
