On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was at Utah Valley University for one of his outreach events, this one billed as "America's Comeback Tour". As was his modus operandi, Charlie was debating with a student, this time on the topic of 'transgenderism'. The student had just asserted that 'gun violence by transgenders' (tgv) was a minuscule — an almost imperceptible — portion of the whole spectrum of 'gun violence', and Charlie had just asked for a clarification:
Charlie's last question was "Counting or not counting gang violence?" At that instant, a sniper's bullet severed Charlie's left carotid artery and he collapsed in a pool of blood, his last question unanswered. It is said that had a trauma surgeon been sitting at Charlie's side at the time, it would have made no difference. The wound was not survivable.
Why would Charlie Kirk have thought such a 'clarification' important?
The United States occupies 3.8 million square miles. That's a lot of space in which 'gun violence' can occur. But... if you were to put a pin in a map of the U.S. for every incident of 'gun violence', you might be surprised (or maybe not) to discover that most of those pins were clustered into several small areas, viz: the 'inner cities' of two dozen or so of our larger cities. The area of those clusters, combined, is about 400 square miles, one one-hundredth of one percent of the total area of the nation.
If you were to exclude those areas — where much, most, or all of the nation's 'gang violence' occurs — from the crime numbers for the whole of the nation, the U.S. would look like a very safe place, indeed.
So, if you compare tgv to the national numbers, you get a very different answer depending on whether you're including those inner city numbers or not. If you include gang violence, then tgv disappears in the haze. If you exclude gang violence, tgv is a startlingly large portion of what's left, far out of proportion to the percentage of transgender individuals within the U.S. population.
It's a trick question: — if the answer is 'including', then the student is implicitly admitting that tgv is akin to gang violence; if the answer is 'excluding', then the student risks their basic premise: that tgv is a minuscule problem.
And that's why Charlie's last question was — and still is — important.
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