Charlie Kirk, Gun Culture and “Regeneration through violence,”

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

9-13-25

 

My birthday celebration Wednesday, walking among the beautiful Muir Woods ancient Redwoods, I made the mistake to check my phone for messages and found it bursting with news of an assassination by gun of the right wing darling, Charlie Kirk in Utah. 

It got me thinking of the scourge of gun ownership in the US, like no other country, mass shootings and assassinations. Utah and next door Wyoming. The two states have few restrictions on gun purchase, ownership, or carry, calling themselves “Constitutional Carry,” interpreting the Second Amendment of the Constitution. I wrote a book of essays on the Second Amendment. 

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While doing, I ran on to a comment by the late Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson: “Without guns, there would be no West,” adding that his grandfather had settled in the Wyoming territory two years before Custer’s defeat by the Sioux and the Cheyenne nations at the Little Big Horn. 

He pointed out in another interview that in Wyoming, “how steady you hold your rifle, that’s gun control in Wyoming.” Here Simpson revealed that when firearms were no longer needed to appropriate Native American lands, the firearm became a representation of ongoing racist domination—a kind of war trophy—not just of Native Peoples and their territories, but of African Americans, brown immigrants and the non-European world. 

The degree of racist pathology inherent in this perspective has become so normalized that it was barely news when George Zimmerman openly auctioned the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin, selling it for $250,000 to a mother who bought the gun as a birthday present for her son. In his auction listing “Mr. Zimmerman touted the weapon, a Kel-Tec PF-9, as ‘an American firearm icon’” and vowed to help stop the Black Lives Matter movement.

 “Regeneration through violence,” is what Richard Slotkin calls the martial tradition that goes to the root of the founding and behavior of the U.S. settler-state in the world after the “closing of the frontier,” which continues to this day domestically in multiple violent forms.

 So we had our regeneration through violence on Wednesday, the horror expressed understandable, but not analyzed as revelatory.