Guns mean freedom? What freedom?

Charlie Kirk believed guns protect our freedom, but it’s an illusion.

Because so much of his rhetoric had been recorded and widely shared, Charlie Kirk’s cynical comments about deaths by gun appeared in social media soon after his death by gun.

“Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, that is part of liberty,” Kirk said, in his usual cocksure manner, before a Turning Point Faith audience in April 2023.

He compared gun deaths to highway deaths: We’ve decided, he said, that the deaths of thousands of people each year on our roads is worth the freedom to drive. In Kirk logic, a similar sacrifice should be expected in a country with more than 400 million guns in private possession: “It’s worth it to have 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.”

Never mind that automotive deaths are primarily accidents, or that automobile manufacturers were forced to make safer vehicles, or that most states require people to be trained to operate a car or truck before being licensed to use one.

But the gun-car comparison is not what I want to address today, as authorities in Utah hunt for Kirk’s killer, his family deals with the shocking loss and students at Utah Valley recover from the trauma of witnessing Kirk’s murder.

It’s this idea that guns make us free. It’s an illusion.

There have been so many shootings — mass shootings, political assassinations, street shootings, household shootings, suicides — that they have diminished our sense of freedom. They have made us more conscious of the possibility of a shooting. They have made us feel less safe.

And they have prompted more and more Americans to buy more and more guns, heightening the ricks of more and more deaths.

Where’s the freedom in that?

Where’s the freedom in the worry about getting shot at a concert or prayer service?

Where’s the freedom in wondering if the guy who just flipped you the bird in traffic keeps a handgun in his car?

Where’s the freedom in parents worrying about the threat of a mass shooting at their kids’ schools?

Where’s the freedom in constantly having a city’s promise diminished by incessant gunfire?

Where’s the freedom from fear for any of us anymore?

Generations of conservative politicians have refused to lead the country into a new era where there’s actually a united retreat from gun ownership. That conversation never takes place on the right.

Usually a crisis — and the incessant gun violence is a crisis — becomes a crucible for the forging of new leadership, new laws and a new direction.

Where are the brave leaders willing to forge a new path for the country away from all the guns and the violence they make possible?

There are some, but not enough. Republican politicians have been subservient to the American gun lobby, and the American gun lobby has won the battle. As a result, we are a disproportionally violent country.

Charlie Kirk’s comments about inevitable deaths might have been cynical, but they were also accurate, a cold acknowledgement of the math: More than 400 million guns in private ownership, and too many Americans — angry, mentally ill, desperate — willing to use them against others or themselves.

The words of the late scholar Paul Fussell, in his book, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” come to mind: “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends."

And so we have irony in the victory of mass gun ownership over common sense: Many Americans think they are safer with guns when the critical mass of guns guarantees we are not. Many Americans want to believe that guns make us free, but it’s just an illusion.