You Can’t Mourn Him If You Believe in Him

He died the way he lived: by treating death by gunfire as an acceptable cost of freedom.

He told his followers that “it’s worth it” for Americans to suffer — and die — from gun violence so that the Second Amendment remains untouched. That wasn’t a throwaway line. It was his moral claim, stark and chilling, but a claim he seemingly believed fiercely: that every bullet that tears through a classroom, a church, or a grocery store is a sacrifice laid on the altar of liberty. By his logic, his own blood joins that offering and “worth it”. Is it right?

If you truly believed him, you really cannot mourn him. His death is not a tragedy in his worldview. It is proof. It is an inevitable cost. Proof that freedom demands martyrs. Proof that lives, even his own, are expendable in the face of an absolute “gun toting for all” ideology.

But there is the unbearable paradox. You do mourn loss and death. We all do. 

The human impulse is to weep, to rage, to call it unjust that a man was cut down while attempting debate. The human impulse recoils thinking of grief-stricken families, colleagues left stunned, and young people forced to carry that memory forever. The human impulse insists more empathy and sympathy (which only arises after empathy is possible).

To mourn his death sincerely, though, is to admit that he was wrong. 

That every life — his life — deserves more than to be collateral damage in a culture war. That no political idea is worth the normalization of sudden / unjust murder in our public squares.

If you can’t make that admission, then you don’t get to grieve him… honestly. You can only pretend soldier play and salute him as a casualty of his own uncompromising creed, one that demanded everyone else pay the price, until the bill finally came due for him too.

And so, the question his death leaves us with is not whether we mourn, but whether we learn. The cultures of this planet at war with one another only lead to more violence … more peace making and more understanding of those different cultures is what the world needs now.