Bullets Don't Ask Your Name

The world erupts when Charlie Kirk dies. 

A name. A face. A headline. 

Suddenly, outrage floods timelines.

No one deserves to die at the hands of another person. No child, no mother, no family deserves to watch life slip away from the eyes of someone they love in front of thousands. This. Is. What. We’ve. Been. Saying. Those of us against gun violence are not celebrating. We are grieving the fact that it has happened again.

But where is the fire for the children whose laughter is swallowed by bullets, their sneakers still spinning on the playground? For classrooms echoing with silence, abandoned backpacks spilling over blood-streaked floors? For the children in Gaza whose tiny hands never grasped a pencil, whose first steps were stolen by bombs?

Why does our outrage flare for some, then flicker and fade for the innocent everywhere else? Why do we mourn the names in headlines but ignore the ones that never make the news? Had there been footage of 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski fighting for their lives in the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, would it finally click that these are real children, not statistics, not background noise, not just another headline to scroll past? Or would our grief still be reserved only for the names we choose to remember?

Even Kirk believed it was “worth it”—that a few deaths every year were the acceptable cost of protecting a God-given amendment. But like so many, he assumed it would never be him. What he really meant was: your life is expendable, as long as you don’t force me to rethink my freedoms. Bullets don’t ask your name. They don’t care about your politics, your fame, your faith. Gun violence doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t pause to consider whose life it’s about to take—or whether it will vanish quietly into statistics.

And yet, here’s what frustrates me most: we should all be on the same side. No one wants children to die. No one wants families shattered. No one wants classrooms turned into tombs. And yet, somehow, we argue over politics, over amendments, over rhetoric—while the body count rises. How is it possible that the desire to protect human life isn’t enough to bring us together? It’s hypocritical to mourn the death of someone taken by gun violence while ignoring the thousands of other lives lost every year, and while refusing to confront the epidemic in our own country. Grief shouldn’t be selective—it shouldn’t depend on fame, politics, or proximity. Every day, approximately 12 children die from gun violence in the U.S., and another 32 are injured (Sandy Hook Promise). Every day, 12 classrooms lose their voices, 12 lunches go uneaten, 12 futures vanish into smoke and sirens. Firearms are now the leading cause of death among children and teens, surpassing car accidents and cancer (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health). School shootings alone have increased more than 12-fold since 1970, with the rate of children being victims quadrupling and the death rate rising more than sixfold (American College of Surgeons, 2024). Yet we scroll past, as if this is normal.

So I have to ask: when is it not worth it? 

If it’s not the children. 

If it’s not an idolized political figure. 

If it’s not someone you know. 

Where do we draw the line?

The same day Kirk was shot, there was a school shooting in Colorado. Do we not find it humiliating, as a nation, that we can’t even keep up with the number of shootings in our own backyard? In Canada, children are almost ten times less likely to die from gun violence (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2020). Yet here, we scroll past the headlines as if it’s something to accept. This isn’t normal. But we’ve convinced ourselves it is. We’ve learned to treat death like background noise. We are desensitized to atrocity. That is the most dangerous place a society can be—not outraged, not mourning, but numb. Numbness means inaction. Numbness means accepting the unacceptable.

The real question is not just why do we grieve selectively, but what will it take to break through our numbness? Are we going to do something—or just argue over rhetoric? Are we going to do something—or will grief always remain selective, reserved for the few names we decide are worth remembering? If outrage only follows headlines, change will never come. It’s time to grieve every life, speak every name, and demand a world where bullets no longer decide whose story ends.