'A dark day' Killing stuns nation living in the shadow of the gun

At 12.23pm on Wednesday, as the rightwing influencer and provocateur Charlie Kirk was addressing a large crowd at Utah Valley University, a single shot rang out. He was struck fatally by a bullet in the neck, sending thousands of screaming students scattering in all directions and propelling the country into a new and dangerous crisis.

- Ed Pilkington

Exactly one minute later, at 12.24pm, 450 miles to the east in Colorado, a 911 call came in to first responders in the mountain town of Evergreen. A 16-year-old student had opened fire on high school grounds, critically injuring two pupils before turning the weapon on himself.

The confluence of two bloody incidents just one minute apart – the first taking the life of a key figure in Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, the second erupting in the same school catchment district as the 1999 Columbine massacre – underlined America's dirty, little non-secret: the ubiquitous, quotidian nature of its gun violence.

"Yesterday was a dark day in the United States," said the former Republican political strategist and Trump critic, Steve Schmidt. "It was a day of mass violence, of killing, of gun violence – in other words, in America it was a day like any other day."

There have been umpteen calls for prayer, plenty of partisan name-calling and even dark warnings about a coming civil war.

What has been noticeable by its absence, though, is virtually any talk about the instrument that lies at the heart of America's endless bloodletting: the gun.

"America is an insanely violent nation," said Hasan Piker, a progressive influencer who had been scheduled to debate with Kirk at a university in New Hampshire later this month. On his Twitch online stream after the shooting, Piker lamented the lack of meaningful debate about reforming the country's gun laws.

He said: "A bulletproof vest would not have saved Charlie Kirk. Security did not save Charlie Kirk. The only thing that could have potentially saved Charlie Kirk from getting shot in the neck was reasonable gun control."