At the core of the American political psyche lies a violent paranoia that’s difficult for outsiders to comprehend, much less fully reconcile. Realistically, what does a nation protected by two oceans — and flanked by economically dependent, near-surrogate states to its north and south — have to fear from the world? Why does a country with both the greatest wealth and most expansive military in history so often resort to violence, not just abroad, but against its own? These are the questions one must ask as the United States falls into what feels like it could be a repeat of the late Sixties “days of rage” violence.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder yesterday, on the campus of Utah Valley University (UVU), pundits will again call for “national conversations” on toning down political rhetoric, rethinking gun rights, and addressing the increasing mental imbalance of Gen Z and younger generations. Some of these calls for dialogue may be in earnest. But few will go deep enough to touch the raw violence embedded in the American political imagination, which has come to believe differences of opinion are a threat to personal survival. And so, after a few news cycles, nothing, as always, will change. As Ian MacKaye of seminal punk band Fugazi once put it, “there’s no movement in a bad mind”.

Kirk, while highly combative and snark-driven online, was reportedly kind and generous in private — a devoted husband, a loyal friend, and an attentive father. A bad man he was not. But a bad mind is something else entirely. Kirk’s death, like his rise to fame, is the product of a culture war so entrenched, over issues so narrow but also so intransigent, that it now threatens to consume the republic. And in that frame, the place of Kirk’s death matters: not just as a backdrop, but as a symbol of how horridly intolerant and stupid we’ve all become. For Kirk was shot in Orem, Utah, at an event hosted on the campus of UVU — a site highly reflective of the culture war, and one I know intimately, having been born and raised in nearby Holladay.

Utah is far more than red rocks, Mormon temples, and the Osmonds. It’s also a mirror of the national divide, a perfect microcosm of America’s fractured soul. Despite what most people think, Salt Lake City and its surrounding county are solidly blue, aggressively secular, and its residents often go well out of their way to prove their progressive bonafides, not only to outsiders but to themselves. Today, five of the city’s seven council members identify as LGBTQ. The legislature that governs them, however, is dominated by arch-conservative rural and suburban counties — devoutly Mormon, heavily armed, and firmly in the grip of a Right-wing mentality that has less to do with the actual teachings of Joseph Smith and more the influence of Fox News and superficial online influencers like Kirk.

“Utah is a mirror of the national divide, a perfect microcosm of America’s fractured soul.”

Orem and the UVU campus sit on the fault line between these two worlds. The relationship between Salt Lake’s progressive political class and Utah’s conservative rural bloc is not just adversarial. At times, it can feel borderline psychotic. The two groups do indeed want to hurt one another. Even when basic cooperation would obviously benefit both sides, hostility generally triumphs. Last year, for instance, Utah lost the Sundance Film Festival, a major cultural and economic engine. This didn’t happen because it was unprofitable, or poorly run, but because the state legislature refused to offer even modest tax concessions which they would do in almost any other similar circumstance. But punishing urban “libs” was more important than protecting local film workers, tourism jobs, or small business revenue. This isn’t dysfunction, it’s deliberate sabotage, waged in the name of cultural purity. And that’s what makes Utah such a stark lens for understanding Kirk’s shooting.

I’ve witnessed these tensions firsthand. Twenty years ago, I served as the communications director and speechwriter for former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson — one of the most combative local politicians in recent memory. He was, in his way, the Left’s version of Trump, totally abrasive, pugnacious, and completely uninterested in diplomacy of any kind. But he won reelection and was, again, very recently chosen as a top-two candidate for Salt Lake City mayor despite now being in his 70s.

Anderson’s popularity endured because he knew exactly what his base wanted in their heart of hearts — someone willing to take on the Mormon Church and the Republican legislature with unrelenting, theatrical aggression. In Utah, there was never a shortage of culture war material. Anderson fed the beast constantly blasting the LDSs, telling The Guardian they were “Taliban-like”. It may seem like an odd move for a Salt Lake mayor but, believe me, it was a deliberate choice, and the city’s electorate loved it.

The more the mayor condemned Utah conservatives, the more popular he became. We talked about it openly several times. I attempted to steer his rhetoric to a more compromising tone, but was vehemently rebuffed on every occasion. UVU sits right on the fault line — the literal and political divide — between deep-blue Salt Lake County and the hard-red Utah County to the south. I think it’s no coincidence, in other words, that Kirk was killed at this particular intersection. Already, some on the Right have speculated, without evidence, that the shooter must be a trans activist. That narrative will almost certainly gain traction once it becomes more widely known just how deeply LGBTQ advocacy groups dominate Salt Lake City and county politics. In fact, moments before the shooting, someone in the crowd reportedly asked Kirk, “How many of the mass shooters were trans?”

While that possibility can’t yet be ruled out — especially when the Wall Street Journal reports that the shooter’s bullets may have been engraved with expressions of trans ideology — yet more scapegoating won’t solve the deeper issues that led to Kirk’s killing. The causes are both local and national, but at every level the problem is uniquely American. For if Utah’s deep polarisation speaks to a national malaise, giving people ample causes to kill for, these partisan divides are vast and widening right across the Western world. The difference, as the dreadful clips of Kirk’s shooting so vividly shows, is that would-be murderers in the United States can also lean on the vagaries of the Second Amendment.

I’m hardly the first to say this, but guns are everywhere here, something that burrows to the heart of why US citizens tolerate, and even normalise, levels of gun violence that would be unthinkable in any other wealthy nation. More to the point, they’re accessible even to the deeply mentally ill and those with violent criminal records. Decarlos Brown, whose own mother tried to have him committed, infamously stabbed Iryna Zarutska on that Charlotte train last month. But given the laxity of the laws, he could just as easily have shot her. As a show of ideological purity, indeed, many red states have spent the last two decades dismantling even the most basic restrictions on gun ownership. Charlie Kirk was a vocal supporter of that movement. Utah is emblematic of the trend, and the consequences were visible well before Kirk’s murder.

In June, at the “No Kings” rally in Salt Lake City, a man was seen near the edge of the crowd assembling an AR-15 rifle. In true Middle-American fashion, several designated “peacekeepers”, many of them armed themselves, opened fire, believing they were stopping a mass shooting in real time. The man was shot and injured. But so too was an innocent bystander, killed in the crossfire of this chaotic, DIY version of public safety.

Well before anyone pulled a trigger, several rallygoers had already called 911 to report the man and his weapon. Dispatchers told them there was nothing they could do. Their hands were tied — because, in Utah, it’s entirely legal to brandish a loaded assault rifle in public, even at a political rally. In 2021, the state also eliminated its permit requirement for concealed carry. Residents can now carry firearms openly or hidden without a license, training, or any oversight whatsoever.

Anyone 21 and over who can lawfully possess a firearm, which, in Utah, is basically anyone without a criminal record, is completely free to carry a loaded, hidden firearm in public. That’s why the man assembling an assault rifle at the Salt Lake rally couldn’t be arrested until he actually opened fire. The psychological toll of living in such a society — where you can see someone preparing for a massacre and still be told “nothing can be done” — cannot be overstated. Again, I know these fears myself. Years ago, while teaching at the University of Utah, I had undergraduates show up to my office hours with pistols visibly strapped to their chests. Like the rally goers, I was legally unable to do anything — not even refuse to meet with the armed students. The university had attempted to ban firearms on campus, but the legislature sued and won.

“The psychological toll of living in America cannot be overstated.”

A few years later, while teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, one of my undergraduates submitted an essay describing, in graphic detail, a fantasy in which he murdered his professor and then the rest of the class. Even if I had reported the paper, it wouldn’t have led to any firearms being confiscated. Not under Texas law, and definitely not under Utah’s. In 2018, Utah legislators briefly considered a bill that would have allowed courts to issue protective orders removing firearms from individuals deemed “severely mentally ill” or “violent, unstable”. But the bill was quietly stalled in committee and permitted to die. It has never been meaningfully revisited.

Despite the fantasies of the NRA and other pro-gun groups perversely proclaiming “an armed society is a polite society”, for the aware individual living amid this culture of gun fanaticism, the experience often feels quite different. For, if firearms are allowed everywhere, the reality is that you — and your family — might not be safe anywhere, which only feeds the need many feel to further arm themselves, literally and emotionally, in preparation for battle. Charlie Kirk might have been completely earnest in his desire to have good faith debates in public. But in America’s culture of violence and embrace of mostly unnecessary economic insecurity, very few young people are interested in debate of any kind today.

There’s an argument to be made, then, that the collective anxiety sparked by America’s culture of guns encourages political polarisation, and vice versa. The woke Left might be off the rails on issues of race and gender. Progressives might frequently overreach in their attempts to play national therapist. But the American pro-gun movement is just as unhinged — if not more so. The derangement of America’s pro-gun obsession has taken on an almost cultic character. It’s ideological, absolutist, and soaked in a kind of religious fatalism. Indeed, when you combine this fanaticism with the fact that many of its most devout adherents also call themselves “Christians”, it becomes hard not to draw comparisons to Islamism. Either way, the idea that America’s mass shooting epidemic is somehow not a direct consequence of our carte-blanche right to bear arms, and the gun lobby’s relentless campaign to eliminate even modest restrictions, is straightforwardly absurd.

This year alone, there have already been 309 mass shootings in the US. That’s an average of nearly 1.3 per day. Again, firearms in themselves are not surely the only factor here. As the grim example of Decarlos Brown implies, too many dangerous people are allowed to roam the streets, pampered by a naively utopian justice system. But if the closure of dozens of psychotic hospitals over recent decades is clearly a problem, as is the fact that even habitual offenders are not locked up, it’s hard not to return, again and again, to the question of guns and who is allowed to own them.

Among US adults, after all, 1.5-2% of the population experience hallucinations, delusions, or other severe psychotic symptoms. Out of a population of roughly 330-40 million people, that equals around five or six million people — nearly all of whom can arm themselves and take shots at innocent children or public figures they dislike, should the voices in their head instruct them to do so. Examined in its totality, it’s actually surprising there aren’t far more mass shootings and assassinations in the United States, though even the number that do happen are shocking enough.

Just turn on the news. Less than an hour after Charlie Kirk was shot, another school shooting unfolded in Evergreen, Colorado. One teenager was killed and two others seriously wounded. The day before that, six people were shot in San Francisco. Two days earlier, in Cleveland, another six were injured, including a 16-year-old boy shot in the teeth. It hasn’t even been a full two weeks since the massacre at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, where dozens of people, most of them elementary school children, were shot down in church. Two children were confirmed dead, but the final death toll could easily have been in the dozens, all in a country that continues to produce over 70% of the developed world’s mass shootings, year after year, without pause.

Two years ago, at a public event held not long after the Nashville school shooting — in which three children and three adults were killed by a non-binary assailant — Kirk was asked whether the mounting body count had shaken his faith in the Second Amendment. He gave an answer that was appalling in its content, but admirable for its consistency. “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty,” he said. “You’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. I think it’s worth it. 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.”

One must admit, Kirk lived his values right up to the moment an assassin’s bullet pierced his neck. But in 10 years, or 20, will his widow and young children see things the same way? That, in the end, is the real cost of America’s death bargain. It’s easy to call tragedy the cost of “freedom” when the corpses aren’t your own. But, as Ian MacKaye knew, there’s no movement in a bad mind. And today, as Kirk becomes a martyr for the online Right, America feels increasingly overrun by bad minds, and still wholly unwilling to admit the obvious.