Violence as the supreme act of intolerance
Murderers and tyrants throughout history - including the 9/11 hijackers - have applied the same twisted logic as the Charlie Kirk assassin yesterday.
Allison Hemingway-Witty cries after Charlie Kirk was shot during Turning Point USA's visit to Utah Valley University in Orem on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025.
Charlie Kirk was about to pick up the microphone to respond to a question about mass shooting in America when he was shot in the neck at Utah Valley University yesterday.
My colleague Emma Pitt was 5 rows back, positioned on purpose where she could see the speaker well. Her response is worth watching, especially the way she responded to it all:
While the shooter’s specific motive is still being determined, the ultimate logic of any such shooting is disturbingly clear: If you’re opposed to what someone is saying or doing, you hold the power in your hands to make them stop.
This is the deviant mindset of murderers, assassins, abusers and dictators alike. As author Isaac Asimov wrote in 1942, three years into World War 2, “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” - adding that brute force was “the only resort by which incompetent men can thrive. The bully, the brute, the dictator.”
This latest brutality took place on the eve of 9/11, when 19 young men from the Middle East each justified participating in coordinated violence that would lead to the death of nearly 3,000 innocent Americans.
“The epitome of intolerance is taking the life of someone else simply because you disagree with them politically,” wrote Deseret News commentator, Hawkfan79, soon after the news broke yesterday. “Actions like this should be condemned with zero reservations or conditions. Every addition of ‘but his rhetoric…’ is an effort to excuse the inexcusable.”
“Political violence at its core is a rejection of democracy,” said Lilliana Mason, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, in the wake of political assassinations in Minneapolis earlier this summer, when an angry man disguised as a policeman killed former Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home.
Mason, who co-authored Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy, went on to say “if a person has used violence to achieve a political goal, then they’ve given up on the democratic process. Instead, they’re trying to use force to affect government, or politics, or whatever it is that they’re upset about.”
In addition to harming the target, an act of political violence “also intimidates people who were not targeted in a way that makes them think twice about what they want to say and how they want to engage in politics,” Mason continued. Furthermore, such violence across ideological divisions “makes Americans as a whole, less trusting of each other, of elected officials, and of the democratic process altogether.”
“That kind of distrust is poison for democracy,” she stated. “Democracy requires us to have a certain level of faith in each other and a belief that we’re all working toward a common goal.”
This “violates core principles of our country today, our Judeo-Christian heritage, our civil society, our American way of life,” U.S. House speaker Mike Johnson said after the assassination yesterday. “And it must stop.”
“We need every political figure, we need everyone who has a platform to say this loudly and clearly: we can settle disagreements and disputes in a civil manner,” he added. “Political violence ... has to stop.”
Faith leaders have condemned such violence for many years now. “Violence towards those people who are different ... is unacceptable,” Desmond Tutu says, in the context of South African political violence.
And as he led a movement towards the slow pursuit of racial justice through nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr. likewise insisted that attempting to use violence to achieve progress was “both impractical and immoral.”
“Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart,” ancient Israel was commanded in the Book of Leviticus, with the Lord stating further, “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother,” John wrote anciently, “he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”
Even though we see them fine, it’s become pretty easy to hate people all around us in America today - with the increase in political animosity now a feature of our national landscape we take for granted.
This hostility is reaching pathological levels. As Deseret News reported last year, nearly one in four Americans now say violence may be necessary to “save the country” - with a 2024 PRRI survey documenting a measurable increase in U.S. adults (from 15% in 2021 to 23% 3 years later) now agreeing that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
And that’s just what individuals on both sides of the political aisle have been doing more and more. In April, a man tried to kill Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, setting fire to his home while the family slept inside.
In 2017, a man disguised himself as a police officer in an attempt to approach Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s residence. That same year, a congressional baseball practice was ambushed in Virginia, with a gunman opening fire on Republican lawmakers, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise.
Between 2017 and 2015, in the span of 8 years, we’ve seen threatening protesters stationing themselves outside of the personal residences of secretaries of state and Supreme Court justices. We’ve seen an intruder break into the U.S. House speaker’s home and attack her husband with a hammer. We’ve seen pipe bombs mailed to Democratic leaders and media outlets critical of President Trump. And we’ve seen plots to kidnap and harm at least one Supreme Court justice and one sitting governor.
And then, of course, we’ve witnessed a gunman firing from a rooftop during a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania last summer, killing one attendee and injuring others, narrowly missing the former president.
The Bridging Divides Initiative out of Princeton has also been collecting data on violent threats against local government officials and conducting surveys about threats not reported to law enforcement. And Capitol Police reported in 2024 that they had more threats against members of Congress than ever before.
Where does all this lead?
The Book of Mormon describes what happens when one people turn against another with “eternal hatred” that is taught within families until it becomes “fixed."
A pattern of unhinged hatred, once it metastasizes, leads to even more death and destruction.
The only way forward is for people to somehow be persuaded to “lay down their weapons of war, and also their hatred.”
That’s our solution now too. As President Russell M. Nelson shared in his own Time Magazine birthday message earlier this week, “hostility never heals” - calling for steps to soften “bitter divisions” and build “bridges of understanding” among especially “those who may see the world differently than we do.”
But how is it even possible to show love to someone who sees the world so differently? As he emphasized, “Each of us has inherent worth and dignity. I believe we are all children of a loving Heavenly Father.”