Public violence is shot through with symbolic meaning.

Voltaire, in his novella Candide (1759), critiqued the British navy’s absurd practice of public execution. In wry prose, he details how Admiral John Byng was brought to the firing squad in front of his whole fleet, ‘pour encourager les autres’. 

When Parisian patriots carted Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793, reports described a throng of thousands in the Place de la Révolution, there to witness the queen die, but also to internalise that the ancien régime was indeed ancien.

Death is a sentence; public execution is a story.

***

There have long been hot-headed young men so failed of intellectual and spiritual élan that they grab a gun, to win themselves some notice.

Chapman (aged 25) was a suicidal narcissist who yearned for the global attention John Lennon had so artfully earned. Oswald (aged 24) was a confused misfit who sought significance by turning the 6th floor of his Dallas workplace into the most infamous perch of history. And when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria came, by chance, face-to-face with a Sarajevan rebel on the street in 1914, Gavrilo Princip (aged 19) felt the ambitious martyr inside of him well up, and so took aim.

***

But it is Luigi Mangione (aged 26) who wrote the Gen Z Public Assassin’s Playbook in December 2024, by shooting a healthcare CEO in front of CCTV cameras, in the manner of an arthouse college submission.

Master Mangione, in custody facing charges in three States, brought an Instagram veneer to his murdering.  Key was the staging of the crime outdoors, in the city that never sleeps; he then cloaked it in virtue with intellectual doggerel. Mangione held that bullets kill best when they strike twice, and so he engraved each with ideological rhetoric, so the world might understand the high morality of his narcissism.

Since the crime, ‘Luigi’ has maintained the vanity writ large in his assassin’s playbook. During his several perp-walks, he is sure to find the right camera angle for his angled jaw.

His athletic silhouette is outdone only by his brass neck.

***

The political assassination of Charlie Kirk (aged 31), while debating Utah Valley University students on the subject of gun violence, was deliberately a public execution.

A multitude of cameras were trained on Kirk’s face as he engaged in conversation with students, outdoors, when a bolt-action rifle’s bullet savaged his carotid artery. Millions have now seen the conservative activist’s body jerk violently, and the shocking crimson torrent that sprang from his neck.

This includes me. I unwittingly saw the video on X, and involuntarily threw my phone to the floor.

It is a terrible thing, to see a man die.

Echoing the Mangione case in 2024, there is now a drama-filled pursuit of a young and athletic assailant, instantly deemed a hero by some online.

Photographs have been released of the gunman’s stealth, before and after the crime. Predictably, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that transgender and fascist ideology is written on the inside of the rifle recovered near the crime scene. CNN has more cautiously characterised the markings as ‘cultural phrases’.

Many of Charlie Kirk’s political opponents are quick to place a ‘but’ after their professions of revulsion at his assassination. Each ‘but’ subtly alludes to Kirk either contributing to, pre-justifying, being responsible for or deserving his own murder.

In short, if a man exercises his free speech, through provocative debate which offends the beliefs of others, that man beckons his own beheading.

The baying of the crowd, the callow repetitions of fallacious argument, the casual smirks of vox pop commentary – each is a shocking disgrace. To a culture raised on memes and likes, murder is now a parlour game, played for quips and credits.

***

Are we now to kill those with whom we disagree?

It cannot be so.

Public violence is the ultimate expression of ‘no debate’.

Charlie Kirk had the temerity to assert that there are only two sexes; he believed that a man cannot be a woman; he argued against abortion; he welcomed gay people into the conservative movement, but held that their lifestyles contravened his faith.

His trade was provocative rhetoric and open debate – especially among college-going young adults whose lives so often rotate around giving and taking offence. He shared his platform with many a whinger, many a castigator, as well as those who genuinely wished to contest his argument and prove him wrong. Kirk was the ringmaster of his own spectacle of words.

***

But Mangione and his acolytes have determined new rules for public discourse. If a person’s words or actions are felt to be offensive, this justifies their permanent, violent silencing.

And so, with robot stupidity, a hot-blooded young man mounted Utah Valley University’s roof with a rifle, and a bullet destined for Kirk’s neck. All going to plan, this bullet might then ricochet through the vaults of free speech and free thought.

That is, if it is allowed to do so.