From one perspective, this is clearly bad governance. He's using his free speech rights that generations of us died for, to point out hypocrisy.
I'm going to say it, and we'll see if I get arrested for it. Charlie Kirk was one of the useful idiots groomed from high school to push conservative propaganda. One of his assignments was to minimize the cultural impact of school shootings. He died in front of thousands in a school shooting.
Maybe that irony is something and maybe it is nothing. But the essence of conservative propaganda, that will survive any individual propaganda and any individual regime, is the central idea that some of us have rights and freedoms and some of us don't. So any deviation from that idea must be punished very severely.
The conservative view simply is that this correlation is causal, while the liberal view is that the causation runs in the opposite direction of the correlation. That’s not “propaganda,” it’s one way of trying to make sense of the world.
[1] https://www.theviolenceproject.org/data-on-social-media/numb...
The civilian gun stock has grown significantly since the 60s [1]. These data, together, seem to imply a large (but declining) number of households with a couple of guns and a few households with a ridiculous number of guns.
Of course, the dagger in your argument is that American divorce rates are not extraordinary [2]. Our gun ownership and school shooting rates are.
Given school shooters [3] (and now political shooters) come from gun-owning households, it seems fair to pin the blame for these events on that fraction of one third of American households who maintain private armories.
[1] https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_divorce_r...
[3] https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/27379/Study-Adoles...
Reading comprehension moment: the parent comment was carefully not claiming either side of the argument.
Your response, and the downvotes, are as if they declared for the locally unpopular side. They did not.
> The conservative view simply is that this correlation is causal, while the liberal view is that the causation runs in the opposite direction of the correlation.
You're right that the poster doesn't make it clear (deliberately or not) but the use of the word "simply" feels sympathetic, and suggesting that the "liberal view" is that correlation and causation are opposed (when that would typically be counter-intuitive) sounds critical. At least, that was my comprehension of the post, as someone without any skin in the game.
I upvoted rayiner’s comment because it’s argued in good faith.
(What would be in bad faith would be putting forward a third party’s flawed argument without pointing out the flaws for shits and giggles.)
Similarly, it surely is better to compare the same country over time instead of comparing different countries which differ in many additional respects? If your thesis that the availability of guns causes school shootings is true, you should expect to see school shootings going down in the U.S. as the practical availability of a gun goes down.
Bombings were the popular mode of creating mass casualties 50+ years ago even though actual machine-guns were widely available back then and almost completely unavailable for the last several decades.
The most interesting question that arises from this is why the switch from explosives to firearms by perpetrators of mass casualty events.
It wasn't due to regulations on high-explosives, which were essentially cash-and-carry for the entire 20th century. On the other hand, regulation of firearms greatly increased starting in the 1960s.
The second bit he was hardly innovative on. That’s been a thing since at least Columbine.
Others openly suggest capital punishment for nonviolent crimes. E.g. narco boaters, repeat offenders, homeless (see: Killmeade), drugs etc. In fact, we have no sanctions on Singapore, a land where one can indeed be killed for fussing with drugs. There are of course, many other similar examples.
Both the left, right and many between recommend death for many people, in a manner having nothing to do with self defense, response to murder or in alignment with current law. Ouch.
We have a LOT OF PEOPLE TO ARREST! I expect hypocrisy to complicate the process a bit though.
Edit: I should say, by the speed of the dvotes, I'll be on the hitlist too. And upholding the First Amendment and the rest of our Constitution is well worth it.
Edit: what your type tends to be highly obtuse to, is the impending reality of blowback, where your warping of law is turned upon you. But it feels so good now, it must be worth it.
Abuse of power has serious consequences.
Corruption at the very top is what I'd like to see capital punishment for. Exclusively.
Its amazing how far people are willing to bend over backwards to explain how the speech of these public figures is harmless and non-threatening and none of us have anything to worry about (despite their actions putting the lie to it), but apply an entirely different set of standards to people criticising them.
Much of Kirk's public life and the life of his political allies was devoted to minimizing the impact of and the empathy we should feel for school shootings (because the ends justify the means of furthering his political agenda). He went on to die in one.
This happens every day to other people, and the advice of him and his political allies has always been to get over it and to stop politicizing it. It would be great if they could collectively take it and stop politicizing it.
His murder was wrong. It is not true that he would be some kind of universal "civil disagreement" advocate.
Yeah, he would defend right winger or bigot. He would attack anyone not right wing. The rights of people who were not white conservatives did not concerned kirk. He was literally against civil rights, openly. Blacks are all stupid and trans are all groomers. They all should be fired.
I have no idea about what happened between that "left leaning professor" and student. But there is about zero reason to believe what right wing activist like Kirk says about the issue. As far as he was concerned, left need not exist and need to be punished for existing.
Edit - I'm fine with the article, it's abhorrent and relevant. My tongue in cheek comment was about the comments. These comments give me the same feeling of Reddit - angry people arguing over whether someones death was justified or not.
The guidelines state:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
if HN shuts down a story they are accused of stifling discourse and picking sides (apparently _both_ sides to hear it)
and the truth is this is a hugely important series of events for everyone, tech included, regardless of 'side'.
I think the strategy of letting one of these simmer on the back burner every day is the best HN is going to be able to do.
but don't dig into the staff, I'm sure they're not enjoying any of this.
Dang can't really win here as someone else mentioned because we're in unprecedented times. Tech CEOs are going full mask off, like how the Salesforce CEO is asking for the government to send in troops to SF [1] or YC openly courting people deeply tied to the admin. So now you have people noting the hypocrisy of some users being tired of politics conveniently as it ramps up more and more into our personal lives and as tech becomes the government.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/10/salesforce-ceo-says-nation...
Ie you can spend over 3 months in jail before an hearing and still be considered to have had a speedy trial. He’d have to wait til after that period to even file a motion for dismissal on speedy trial grounds, and then wait for the hearing on that to happen.
This is part of why plea deals are so common. Even if he were somehow to be convicted, his sentence would probably be less than the speedy trial window. At a certain point, the prosecution will offer to bump it down to some kind of misdemeanor with jail time less than he’s already done so it’s time served. He may as well plead guilty to that because otherwise he’ll keep sitting in jail waiting on a trial and do more time for no reason.
There’s no realistic route where he gets compensated for being wrongly prosecuted, even if he goes to trial and is found not guilty.
The justice system is deeply, deeply flawed and unjust.
In California, the clock for a misdemeanor is 30 days if a defendant is taken into custody, or 45 days if not in custody. For a felony, it's 60 days from arraignment. If the defendant remains in custody after arrest, arraignment must occur within 48 hours of arrest, or on the first business day after the 48-hour period expires if it ends on a weekend or court holiday. If the defendant is freed from custody prior to arraignment, then arraignment can occur at a later date.
In NY and most red states, the clock is approximately 6 months for felonies. Due to the longer clock, in many of these states the clock begins when the defendant is taken into custody (or the state has a shorter timeframe for trial for defendants in custody). Florida just changed its laws to make the clock start on arraignment, lengthened the time required for arraignment to 30 days for defendants in custody, and made the speedy trial right an affirmative right that the defendant must specifically assert. Unlike pretty much every other state, the clock also restarts if the prosecutor withdraws and re-files the same charges (in almost every other state, the clock is only started anew for new charges.) FL also made the consequences for violation of these rights a mere dismissal without prejudice. (TLDR: don't get arrested in Florida.)
Most defense lawyers will advise clients to waive their speedy trial rights. This is for the lawyer's benefit, not the client's. It allows the lawyer to preserve their negotiating relationship with the prosecutor for future clients. In California, due to the shortened time frames, 99% of the time it is advisable to assert speedy trial rights (especially in felonies, but even in misdemeanors) because the prosecution usually can't get its act together in time. Some forensics can't even be completed in the 60 day window. The defense win rate in proceedings where the defendant asserts their speedy trial rights is so high that prosecutors will always offer a sweetheart plea deal to avoid going to trial.
(Of course the obvious solution is for the prosecutors to just wait until they have an actual complete case before filing charges. But if they did that we wouldn't need speedy trial laws in the first place.)
You sure as hell can get paid for it afterwards.
If the sheriff, DA and judge each thought this was a good idea, it's fair for the voters who hired them to take the hit.
Do we have names of the arresting officers, prosecutors and judge this is in front of?
With that we can determine who above them is elected.
Wouldn’t matter. Those elected would likely be re elected. This wasn’t Trump advising some federal agency to bully someone he doesn’t like. It was the community organizing. This is the will of the people.
This is just rationalising laziness and nihilism. They may get re-elected. That doesn't mean you can't create a lot of chaos and cost for them along the way.
Like, I wish my adversaries would preëmptively conclude that even attempting to oppose me is not worth it.
> This is the will of the people
You're concluding this how?
I think civic laziness and nihilism, particularly in Silicon Valley, did a lot to get us to where we are.
https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/crimefeed/seeking-jus...
Icon backgroundcolor of targetsite reason.com seems to be the same as HN icon backgroundcolor :-D
Go on these people's facebooks, or invite them to Thanksgiving, you'll see the same firehose of shit.
A fun game is to look at Facebook profiles selected from random comment sections.
By doing this, I have come away with even less understanding of people’s believes, motivations, etc.
To be fair, a vigil held in the wake of a death is in mourning. A "vigil" held today for Kirk is a right-wing rally.
Ain't no way people looked at the picture, and genuinely thought "Is he threatening to shoot up the school?". But then again, there are some incredibly stupid people out there.
To me, it mostly seems like manufactured outrage. Someone saw him posting edgy memes, got offended, and called to the cops that the guy was posting about doing a school shooting.
I don't think even that happened. Most likely some law enforcement officials sat down at a table for a brainstorming session trying to figure out a pretext to jail this guy.
It's very easy to see how people could genuinely interpret that as a credible threat of imminent violence. Imagine somebody similar in your area did the exact same thing except with your local high school's name. So this is going to be a very interesting case, because what it's going to come down to is the prosecution arguing that he was aware that it would be interpreted as a threat on the nearby Perry High School, while the defense will claim he shared the meme without understanding the perceived threat it might cause and assumed people would understand he was referencing a previous shooting that occurred at a different Perry High School.
Someone tell the LHC at CERN folks to avoid Tennessee...
Found this on a linked facebook post - no clue if it's accurate.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=25571453995778528&se...
Spooky shit as it sets precedence for anyone to go after anyone for a social media post on any grounds. That's psychotic.
I wish people would stop pretending that this has nothing to do with politics. Belief that the rules should punish anyone you don't like and protect those you do is incredibly popular, and the dominant ideology of this administration and its supporters. It is a political belief, and nobody is seriously combatting it. Still we act as though there are two sides with a shared goal of creating a better world, and differing ideas of how to accomplish that. It's been pretty clearly demonstrated that the goal of this incarnation of the Republican party is an authoritarian police state dedicated to punishing and eradicating whomever they deem an "enemy within". And a lot of voters are ok with this, so long as it doesn't apply to them personally, so long as they're a favored party.
The apparent hypocrisy is naked and insulting. They'll cry "cancel culture" and censorship over companies deciding not to platform bigots while cheering when the police kidnap protestors or outspoken political opponents. I say "apparent" because this all makes perfect sense when you realize that they never cared about free speech or anything else they claimed to. It was always about "good guys" getting to do whatever they want, and "bad guys" getting hurt. The friend-enemy distinction. No policy goals, no principled stance on issues, just a convenient facade.
Here it is to save anyone else:
https://wopclive.linkedupradio.com/assets/images/2025/IMG_73...
He had years to apologise. It could have meaningfully altered the temperature of our discourse, particularly among young men. He never did. Kirk gets no credit for amends he never made.
"Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump's deployment of federal troops to DC. 'Shock and awe. Force,' he wrote. 'We're taking our country back from these cockroaches.'"
Cockroaches! Literally language of the Rwandan genocide. And it's a Christian saying this about other human beings? The man never changed.
(Obviously, he should not have been shot. But his sanctification is repulsive.)
He hasn't been sanctified. He's been martyred. And honestly, the moment I saw the headline and realised who he was, I really hoped he wouldn't die. Because between Epstein and the economy, MAGA has needed a win, and a martyr delivers that to the base.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-biden-death-p...
Or is this comment also unacceptable?
Where is the demarcation?
Surely the other posts are completely benign and there's nothing of interest in there, right? Surely the journalist had a reason for only reporting on the contents of one of his posts, and not the others, and that choice wasn't intentional in order to present a biased interpretation of reality. Surely.
Yes because the sheriff explicitly stated it was the trump quote picture, and nothing else, that got the man arrested, charged and thrown in a cage.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2025/09/23/tennessee-l...
The article even links to the above.
Makes me wonder if you even read the article or already knew what I just said and are being dishonest.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2025/09/23/tennessee-l...
> https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2025/09/23/tennessee-l...
There isn’t anything there that wasn’t in the original article.
i.e. If you post an anti-MAGA meme to Facebook or reddit from an identifiable account you could be charged as this man was. Perhaps the U.S. will try to extradite you. (I would hope most nations have sensible checks and balances to prevent extradition over this sort of thing, but it would still be a PITA.) However, the U.S. might also choose to wait and then arrest you if you ever travel to or through the U.S..
The U.S.'s slide away from freedom of speech could have a huge global impact on people who might think it doesn't effect them. We are far too reliant on American social media.
Canada, the E.U., etc. should be looking at protections to prevent social media companies operating servers in their jurisdictions from sharing information with the U.S. government. It's no longer a hypothetical situation. There is a real threat that is clearly evident now.
EDIT: If you're an emigrant:
More than just a PITA, you could still fail; see [1].
Also - I can't find the source right now - I remember hearing about Russian emigrants in Europe being charged with serious crimes in absentia over criticism of the war, and they were slated for deportation because the bureaucracy still considered all such Russian warrants as valid. The US would probably be harder to excise in this regard.
[1]https://www.dw.com/en/germany-shelters-russians-persecuted-f...
UK and Germany come to mind where the police/law will go after people for what they post.
That's just for developed countries. Consequences are worse in developing countries.
Source?
Once more, it demonstrates that MAGA only cares about free speech as long as it serves their own interest. This is almost comical when you think about J.D. Vance' speech in Munich.
Thanks to reason.com for strongly calling out the BS!
iancmceachern•2h ago
nerdponx•2h ago
mindslight•1h ago
baobabKoodaa•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
Are they? MAGA has made it a point to purge the former GOP of conservatives.
baobabKoodaa•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
In any case, we have polling around non-MAGA Republicans [1]. And contrasting Trump 1 and 2 seems to show how having non-MAGA Republicans, many of whom identified as conservative and didn’t endorse the 2020 coup attempt, makes a difference.
[1] https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines...
baobabKoodaa•31m ago
JumpCrisscross•25m ago
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply no conservatives are MAGA. Just that I would be surprised if a majority of self-identifying conservatives identify with MAGA. (I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of former conservatives were now MAGA.)
The difference is meaningful, because by unifying MAGA and conservatives one loses resolution on a powerful breakaway faction. (The main reason we had a free and fair election in 2020 is because some Republicans upheld their oaths to the Constitution.)
boston_clone•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
Good comparison. One of the victims of the Night of the Long Knives were the Strasserists [1][2]. It’s absolutely legitimate to point out when the German Socialist movement was coöpted by Hitler.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism
baobabKoodaa•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
You’re really going to reduce a historical event to platitudes?
What people call themselves matters. It may not be strictly correct. But it’s an identity, and that predicts how they’ll align in a crisis or movement.
baobabKoodaa•37m ago
JumpCrisscross•24m ago
I know. A platitude is a trite and obvious remark.
Whether the Nazis are true socialists is a red herring. The point is the people who called themselves socialist before the Nazis were systematically purged by the Nazis once they coöpted their party. It would be incorrect to say self-identified socialists were responsible for everything the Nazis did; it would be correct to say they enabled them to rise to power.
Bratmon•1h ago