To the Editor:
The violence that happens every day within our borders is shocking. Already since the start of this school year (Aug. 27, 2025) there have been 47 school shootings, with 19 children dead and 77 others injured. As we saw in Minneapolis, not a single hour of school went by for these children without needless and horrific death. Our students and teachers go to school every day fearing that they may be shot and killed, and their fear is right, as the United States has five times the rates of gun death than any other country.
My heart is full with grief for so many families whose lives are torn apart, and equally filled with disgust at the apathy that this terror is met with by so many. Now with the recent news of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we see the truly selective empathy of so many. Many of his supporters have come out to condemn political violence, who had previous supported his Kirks own words “I think it’s worth having a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
This is Charlie Kirk’s own words after six people (three children and three adults) were killed at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn. Is that attack not considered gun death? Why would we not give the same half-mast and mourning to the hundreds of children dead over the years at the very same cause? Why have people not come out in droves for the student killed and in critical condition shot on the very same day? Is all preventable violence bad or just some? It’s time for Americans to do away with selective empathy for people they agree with, and start meaning it when they say: there is NO place for violence in America.
In this moment of violence and uncertainty, if you feel that this was an act of horrific violence, then you must reconsider what action America must take on gun death. I choose NOT to live by Kirk’s own words, and instead believe that NO family be torn apart, NO child left fatherless or mother left childless. We can stop these preventable deaths.
Otherwise we should treat Kirk with the same level of empathy that he gave dead children.
Alice Paul
Warwick