Rushing to judgement

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No-one yet knows exactly what drove Tyler Robinson, allegedly, to shoot Charlie Kirk last week, although that hasn’t stopped various people declaring the reason with absolute certainty. Trump, along with Musk and sundry other unhinged Americans, have claimed that it was the ‘radical left lunatics’ (which seems to be code for everyone from ‘only moderately right-wing Democrats’  to actual socialists). Some even went so far as to demand the designation of the Democrats as a terrorist organisation and the immediate incarceration of all party members, on the basis that the action of one man who probably wasn’t a Democrat anyway was enough to make them all guilty. Others have suggested that the shooter was a Groyper (no, I’d never heard of them either) and that Kirk was shot for not being right wing enough. A third theory is that the killing was much more personal and less political than that, because the shooter may have been in a relationship with a transgender person, something which was anathema to Kirk. Time will tell.

If only half of what I’ve read since the shooting is true, Kirk seems to have held what many of us would consider to be some deeply unpleasant and hateful views. They don’t justify shooting him, of course – we shouldn’t even need to say that – but he was highly polarising, and made plenty of enemies. There are, though, some double standards at work here. It’s only a matter of days ago that Trump openly celebrated the extra-judicial killing of 11 people aboard a boat which he claimed was trafficking drugs to the US. Even if he was right about their intentions (and the only thing stopping me giving him the benefit of any doubt about that is his usual inability to tell the truth about anything), the crime which they were committing was not one which would be punishable by death in the US itself. Arbitrary application of capital punishment by presidential whim without any process at all does not sit well alongside a condemnation of an assassination on US soil; it implies that the objection is not to killings per se, but is based on drawing a distinction between victims based on the president’s opinions.

The argument for the warning-free attack on the alleged drug smugglers is that killing 11 of them will prevent many more deaths from drugs amongst US citizens (of whom, apparently, around 300 million out of a total population of 340 million were killed by drug overdoses last year – according to Trump). Balancing good and evil is a thing which governments do, but the problem is around certainty. There’s a parallel with the old historical dilemma: if someone had assassinated Hitler in 1936, or Stalin in 1924 – before either of them had presided over mass murder – would history see the assassin as a hero or a villain? We can never know whether, or to what extent, history would have been changed, because we can only ‘know’ about the history that actually happened. Killing people as a precautionary measure against the drugs they are smuggling, or the hate they are spreading, in an attempt to prevent harm which might or might not be caused in the future, is a dangerous approach which ultimately leaves all of us open to an arbitrary application of ‘justice’. That’s as true for actions taken by governments as it is for those taken by lynch mobs or lone individuals – trying to draw distinctions merely blurs a clear moral line.