Another day, another shooting. Another day, I am sad and ashamed to be American. I’ve added Charlie Kirk’s death as another line on the incredibly long list of reasons why I won’t return for good.
I live in a small town in the northwest of Ireland. When people find out where I’m from, they usually scrunch up their faces and say, “Oh big change!” The face fellow journalists make when I explain my professional moves is even more dramatic.
I left New York City, and a dream job as a staff editor at The New York Times, for the beauty, calm and safety of rural Ireland. This is a decision I think about often, and every day, I’d make it again. One of the last of the many shooting stories I worked on at NYT was particularly brutal, the Uvalde school shooting. Nineteen elementary school students and two teachers died. Parents of the victims were asked for DNA samples to help identify the victims. Their faces still haunt me. When the first messages started trickling into the print hub, the desk where I worked, the information was brief. School shooting in Texas was all I had. I said a silent prayer that it wasn’t at my niece’s school. Texas is a big state, I told myself. She was probably safe. Thankfully, she was.
But Uvalde was 15 minutes away from her school. I think about the scared children who died waiting for authorities to act, which in the end was 77 minutes after the first shots were fired. I think about how in the aftermath of shootings such as Uvalde, conservative states’ responses is often to roll back rather than strengthen gun control.
READ MORE
Kirk was an influential right-wing activist. He was speaking about his views on transgender politics and mass shootings at Utah Valley University on Wednesday when he was shot and killed. In 2023, on the subject of gun violence, he said: “I think it’s worth 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.” I have seen posts online celebrating his death and others saying that he lived by the sword, and died by the sword. Like those children in Uvalde, he didn’t deserve to die.
Whatever our disagreements were about the second amendment (and many other topics), I know that ultimately we agreed on one: the first amendment.
The right to free speech, a right Kirk spent a career exercising until one person with an old “Mauser .30-06 calibre high-powered bolt-action rifle” decided to take his life. Often, when I disagree with my mother, who is an immigrant to the US, she smiles and says, “It’s a free country.”
I no longer believe that to be the case. Americans are not free.
You’re not free if you train your loved ones to walk on your non-dominant hand side so as to not impede your marksmanship, as some of my family members do. You’re not free if you can be killed by a stray bullet while you lie sleeping in your bed. You’re not free if you fear dropping your children off at school, if you fear going to the supermarket, the cinema, the office, the airport. You’re not free if you die speaking your mind, however appalling I found some of Kirk’s ideas.
On school shootings, Kirk asked: “If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?”
A decade my senior, my brother was well into his law enforcement career when I was still in school. He coached me and my sister often about what to do if ever I found myself in a school shooting, or other dangerous situation. For my 16th birthday, he brought me to a shooting range. I can’t remember if the idea was his or mine. Shaking, I fired the gun once. I cried.
He hugged me and then practised his shooting for another hour.
Recently, I dropped something off to a friend at a secondary school here in Ireland. I parked my car and walked right through the front door, quickly finding a secretary. I was shocked by the ease of it all. In my own school in the US, visitors entered through a set of bullet-proofed double doors. They remained penned into a bullet proof box until they pressed their ID to the glass and stated the reason for their visit through a speaker. Often, the armed police officer would be there, waiting to pat them down before allowing them inside.
I don’t go back to the US often. And the more news stories I read, the less likely it is I’ll return anytime soon.
I am grateful to now live in a country where I will not have to coach my son about what to do in active shooter situations, that he will not have to endure lockdown drills at school.
Kirk believed that reducing gun violence was straightforward: more guns in the hands of more Americans. This is a belief shared by many Americans, including many of my family members. Of course, if the armed good guys don’t act quickly enough to stop the armed bad guys, what good does that do? And Kirk’s views on more guns equalling more protection doesn’t really pan out. America already has more guns than residents, and these estimates are probably low as they don’t take into account ghost guns. (These ghost guns are something Ireland now has to reckon with, due to the US, though they are not yet nearly as ubiquitous.)
And yet, of course, we know the US has more mass shootings than any other country. As a country, America has put “liberty” ahead of “life”, and in doing so lost all three of its unalienable rights.
I’ll bring a pen to a gunfight any day. If that makes me a lamb; fine, I’m a lamb. I’m in Ireland after all, I’ll have plenty of company in the fields.
I feel the same way about Kirk’s death as I did about US president Donald Trump’s assassination attempts. It is the same way I feel about children dying at schools, and other gun violence. I feel sad to be from a place that values deadly cold metal over human life.
Adriana Casserly is a freelance writer and journalist in the northwest of Ireland. Previously, she was a staff editor at The New York Times
[ Message from the Editor: The darkening mood of American politicsOpens in new window ]
