Last week, about the time I was welcoming a latecomer to our regular Wednesday afternoon meeting, the news came down that Charlie Kirk, who had been shot earlier that day, had died.

While no one in the group was a big fan of the man, we were still saddened that he had died, leaving his wife with two young children.

I knew, though, that some would celebrate his death (which should be beneath any decent person), and that it wouldn’t be long till someone blamed someone (anybody but the perpetrator) who had absolutely nothing to do with it (I won’t even get into the whole idiocy about not properly grieving Kirk; no one gets to force you to grieve or mandate how you grieve.)

It wasn’t long before one of the resident trolls posted under my column last week, “Might rhetoric like this from Brenda Looper have had anything to do with the killing of conservative icon Charlie Kirk?”

Well.

Gosh, I had no idea that imploring people to not “act ugly,” pointing out that life isn’t all puppies and rainbows if you’re not a straight white Christian man, and noting that we have to get back to doing the right thing just because it’s the right thing, was fiery rhetoric. All that effort was wasted, I guess, on rewrites to be more measured and thoughtful. (This particular column as it appeared in the newspaper had about four rewrites, though I saved some material from earlier versions for the blog version, where I’m a little freer to opine.)

Then again, the tactic now is to blame someone else, and who better to blame than someone who points out that rhetoric that pits us against each other is a huge part of the problem we have in this country? How dare anyone pay attention to the man behind the curtain!!!

We don’t examine things in full anymore, but curate with our biases. That’s one of the reasons such wildly divergent images of Kirk have emerged. What we saw from one side was a Godly Christian man just doing the best for his family and challenging opponents with respect and truth while also “owning the libs” (though that’s hardly a Christian act, it excited his online followers), while the other side saw the horrible things he had said and done on his social media accounts, in interviews, on podcasts and anywhere else he could make his opinions known about anything “woke” or friendly to those for whom the system doesn’t necessarily work (people of color, women, LGBTQ+, etc.), as well as all the misinformation he spread (and those college debates where he actually just baited unprepared opponents with the intent of humiliating them rather than actually debating them).

The thing is, whether angel or devil, no one deserves to die like that, and if politics hadn’t so infected normal life in the United States, more people could see that. They’d also see that calling out hate (and seriously, calling for violence, or for rights to be taken away from people you don’t like is hate, pure and simple) is not hate, but a call to examine ourselves and how we live our lives.

While some are casting blame far too soon (we don’t know the motive yet behind the murder, other than that the accused perpetrator reported said he didn’t like Kirk) and inflaming passions that are already too high, some of us out here just want cooler heads to prevail. We want people to consider facts before opinion.

One of those facts: The person who shot Kirk is to blame, period. If he was radicalized by the left or the right (again, it’s not clear), they might share a portion of the blame, but they didn’t put the gun in his hand and choose to pull the trigger. That’s on the gunman.

Another fact: The “radicals” on either side are far outweighed by those in the center left, center and center right. Painting opposition in broad strokes does nothing but confuse the situation, as conservatives, liberals, libertarians, independents (yo, me!) and others come in all flavors, and they can hold seemingly diametrically opposed opinions on an issue at the same time because life is but shades of gray. Liberals can be pro-regulation and pro-business, just as conservatives can be. It’s possible to be both pro-choice and anti-abortion; you can advocate for others to have a choice in reproductive matters while choosing not to have an abortion yourself because their choice is their own, just as yours is, and you wouldn’t want someone else to make your choice for you.

I’m socially liberal (sometimes libertarian), fiscally conservative, and moderate on most matters (there are more of us in the middle out here than in either major party). Yet I’ve been blasted by people across the political spectrum as a die-hard Republican nut (I belong to no party and never have) or “safe-space-certified,” among other things. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

If someone on the right doesn’t like me, I’m a liberal loon who wants abortions on demand up to the moment of birth (seriously, that’s not a thing) and thinks all conservatives should be sterilized or unalived (I’m still not crazy about this particular word, but it gets past social-media strictures on “killed”). If someone on the left doesn’t like me, I’m a right-wing nutjob who thinks guns should have more rights than people.

Demonizing all liberals because of the shooting of Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice in 2017, or all conservatives because of the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords and the deaths of six others at a town hall in 2011, does no one any good.

Well, except for those who feed such characterizations, and those who benefit from the distraction from real issues, especially in situations where the facts aren’t available all at once (which is basically all the time where crime is concerned).

The same day Kirk was killed, a Colorado teen opened fire on school grounds, injuring two students before he killed himself. While we need to have a come-to-Jesus on political violence, we need that as well on the subject of guns, especially when they outnumber residents in the United States and are in the hands of less than 50 percent of that population.

I grew up around guns, and I took hunter-safety classes in 4-H. I’m not anti-gun by any stretch of the imagination, but good aim and a bad temper don’t mix well (nor does depression), so I don’t own a gun (I do own a machete and a scythe, though, so don’t test me). Not everyone is that self-aware, unfortunately, and not everyone should have easy access to firearms.

We’re always told after a shooting that it’s too soon to talk about regulating guns, then that regulations don’t work because the bad guys don’t care about rules. Nothing ever changes because the Second Amendment absolutists, the NRA and their pawns shout down opposition and won’t let anything change, despite the overwhelming majority of people in the United States who support efforts like universal background checks and other regulations. And those laws really need to be nationwide rather than the patchwork of state laws we have now (which makes it very easy for those who shouldn’t have guns to get them).

Maybe at some point we’ll actually try something, like red-flag laws (which have worked elsewhere and are structured to protect due-process rights), or requiring insurance and registration (ya know, like with cars). But I won’t hold my breath, even though no less a conservative icon than the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made clear multiple times that the Second Amendment is not unlimited.

Yeah, what did that guy know?

No law will stop every possible scenario, but doing nothing is clearly not working … except for the gun and ammo manufacturers and the funeral industry … and the businesses that feed off all the division these shootings produce.

In the meantime, I know that the next shooting (there’s always another one) will provoke outrage, finger-pointing, and ultimately, no changes to the status quo, as will the one after that, the one after that, and so on.

And the people who point out inequities and other ills in a measured manner with facts, and who ask that we do the right thing, will continue to be blamed for hateful rhetoric by those who value discord over any show of unity. Because that’s the world we live in now.

I’m just over here being my goofy self, eating chocolate, cuddling kitties, and obsessing over words while occasionally opining on something that’s important to me, like rights and behavior.

But sure, I’m evil for advocating listening to our better angels.