“Charlie Kirk’s funeral Sunday will be a historic moment for conservatives,” Henry Olsen writes at the Washington Post. “Kirk’s widow, Erika, President Donald Trump and his allies will understandably want to use the event to call out a tide of left-wing intolerance and violence. But they need to strike the right tone — or they risk squandering Kirk’s legacy.”

Value, with legacies as with everything else, is subjective. Whether you’ve invested well, or squandered, a legacy comes down to what you’d prefer to accomplish with that legacy and whether you succeed or fail at it.

In a perfect world, Charlie Kirk’s supporters would focus on, and mine the legacy value of, his reputation as an advocate of free speech and debate. Whatever one thinks of the views he promoted and defended, there’s 24-karat gold in the notion that verbal argument is, in both moral and practical terms, better than physical violence as a means of resolving disputes.

We do not live in a perfect world.

In our imperfect world, prominent figures on the “MAGA” right — including but not limited to the president and vice-president of the United States — look at Charlie Kirk and see their very own Horst Wessel.

Like Kirk, Wessel was an accomplished advocate and public speaker for his political party: The National Socialist German Worker’s Party, aka the Nazis. Unlike Kirk, Wessel was also a violent “stormtrooper” who engaged in street violence against the Nazis’ opponents.

Like Kirk, Wessel was murdered at a fairly young age. Like Kirk (for the moment, anyway), the motives behind his murder were unclear.

Joseph Goebbels immediately and successfully began promoting Wessel as a martyr to the Nazi cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Adolf Hitler’s political opponents.

Goebbels’s MAGA equivalents are already hard at work promoting Kirk as a martyr to their cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Donald Trump’s political opponents.

For years, I’ve heard from some quarters that Trump is “literally Hitler.”

We’re about to find out whether, and if so to what extent, that’s true.

If he and his underlings continue with the Horst Wessel approach, and use Kirk’s funeral as an opportunity to call for more heads on more pikes in Kirk’s name, it’s almost certainly true.

If he and his underlings take a few deep breaths, examine their own motives and souls, and turn Kirk’s funeral into a celebration of free speech and open debate, it probably isn’t.

Either way, they’ll only have squandered Kirk’s legacy if they don’t manage to squeeze whatever they’re after out of that legacy.

As for the rest of us, we avoid squandering it by paying attention to how it’s used.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On September 10, Florida’s 1st District Court of Appeal looked at the state’s law against “open carry” of firearms, looked at the US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment, and noticed that the latter supersedes the former.

Five days later, Florida Attorney General James Uthmier issued “guidance to Florida’s prosecutors and law enforcement,” notifying them that “as of last week, open carry is the law of the state.”

Well, not “as of last week,” actually. Try “as of 1845,” the year Florida became a state. Per Madison v. Marbury, “an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void.” It just took a long time for the fake “law” to be noticed and nixed by a court.

Such a straightforwardly correct court ruling, and its relatively quick acceptance by a power-hungry politician whom one might expect to reflexively contest it, may seem strange even by Florida standards (interestingly, the now-common “Florida Man” phenomenon emerged a few months after I moved to the state … make of that what you will).

Even stranger, though, is the reaction I’m seeing from some hoplophobes — people who suffer from an irrational fear of guns — in Florida (and elsewhere, but let’s stick to Florida).

Yes, they’re scared, but that kind of goes with the whole “irrational fear” thing, doesn’t it?

For some reason, though, they say they’re MORE scared of “open carry” than of “concealed carry.” They’re more spooked by the thought of seeing a single 9mm pistol on someone’s belt at the grocery store than by the knowledge that there are 20 others, concealed inside jackets, purses, etc., in that same store.

Florida only recently became constitutionally compliant on “concealed carry” with the elimination of its permit requirement, but that permit system had already been in place for decades. Any time you’re in public in Florida — or in any of the other 49 states — there’s a good chance that someone within your visual field is packing a pistol inside his or her jacket, purse, etc.

If I suffered from an irrational fear of a ubiquitous inanimate object — more than 100 million Americans own more than half a billion guns; that only a tiny fraction of a single percent are ever used to kill people is what makes the fear so irrational — I’d much rather be able to see and avoid that object and those carrying it than live in constant knowledge that they’re probably all around me, all the time. Just sayin’ …

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on, it’s that no one should be murdered for speaking.

In the aftermath of Charlie “Prove Me Wrong” Kirk’s murder at a Utah campus event, it’s clear that no, we don’t all agree on that.

The bulk of responses to Kirk’s assassination consisted of:

1) Sober condemnations of murder in general, or murder over speech, from most people, and

2) Opportunistic condemnations of “political violence” from the most politically violent creatures on the planet, politicians.

But we also saw significant amounts of celebration among Kirk’s opponents, and baying for the blood of anyone not aligned with Kirk among Kirk’s supporters (some of whom on “the right,” it should be noted, were vehement critics right up until the instant the single shot rang out).

Not good. More and more Americans seem more and more willing lately to countenance the “political violence” that most Americans (including its politician practitioners)  still condemn.

Despite this last week’s fevered comparisons of the killing to the killings of JFK, RFK, MLK, and 3,000-plus people on 9/11, Kirk’s life and death, and his killer’s, are likely destined, within a few short years, to become the material of minor footnotes in dry historical texts.

Kirk and his killer are this past week’s, maybe this year’s, Brian Thompson and Luigi Mangione.

Yes, their notoriety will persist for more than the usual short news cycle, with bumps during associated court cases, etc., but none of them were so wildly noteworthy before their tragic interactions that they’ll be universally remembered a decade, let alone a century, hence.

That thought might comfort you.

It shouldn’t.

Last year, about 17,000 Americans were murdered.

How many of their names do you remember?

Do you consider “political violence” a differentiating factor worthy of closer attention than you’d give the victims of street robberies or domestic violence?

If so, ask yourself whether you’ve even heard names given to the 11 people politically murdered by the US government on a boat in the Caribbean on September 2.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve heard Lavoy Finicum’s name mentioned in the nine-year period starting about a month after his political murder by FBI agents in 2016, or Garrett Foster’s name mentioned in the last year, starting shortly after his political murderer was pardoned by Texas governor Greg Abbott.

Charlie Kirk’s name will fade from memory precisely because “political violence” is the not-so-new normal.

Personally, I’d prefer to live in a society where murder is so rare that we can remember every victim’s name whether the motive for the killing was “political” or not — and a society where the victim’s speech is never used as moral justification.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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