On Wednesday, September 10, a young father and husband was shot and killed while speaking in front of approximately 3,000 people on a college campus in Utah. Included in the crowd were children, some under the age of 14. Some were even standing near Charlie Kirk at the time of his assassination, witnessing firsthand an extremely violent and gruesome act. No parent in that moment could properly shield their child from the horror that unfolded. It is a moment in history that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Online, millions of others viewed a video clip of the assassination. Thanks to autoplay features, many of these millions of viewers had no idea what horror they were about to be exposed to when they opened their social media feed that afternoon.
How many of these millions of online viewers were children? Children who, without looking for it, viewed the tragic ending of a man’s life on the same device that they receive “I love you” texts from their mom, or follow along with a Sunday morning Bible reading from their pastor. The profane and the sacred both exist in the palm of our children’s hands.
I spoke with a mother who has taken careful steps to limit her ten-year-old’s access to digital media, yet, while he was riding the school bus a classmate showed him the gruesome murder video. She shared with me that she had intentionally not viewed the video herself but is now confronting how to help her young son.
I have heard of a few other accounts of teenage boys texting or direct messaging the video to classmates, with little warning or thought given to their actions.
I also spoke with Caroline Melear, a Public Policy Analyst in Florida, who had met and interacted with Charlie Kirk and his staff on numerous occasions over the past eight years. Melear recounted to me how she had received a text message on the afternoon of September 10 alerting her that Kirk had been shot. As is her normal practice for national news, she logged onto X to learn more. Immediately she was confronted with an autoplay video that convinced her, hours before an official announcement, that Charlie Kirk had died. “I have never seen that much blood come out of someone’s body. It was unbelievable. I can’t stop seeing it,” she told me.
My own mother had a similar experience. She was watching a video she believed was not going to show the murder, yet in a split second, before she could look away, she too had viewed the heinous incident.
In all of these cases, adults have related to me just how quickly they saw something that they didn’t want to see or were carefully avoiding. I have yet to speak to an adult who intentionally viewed the video, though I’m sure they exist. After all, someone chose to upload the video, knowing it would go viral. Others reposted the video, maybe believing it to be important to conveying the news of Kirk’s death or maybe out of a depraved fascination. The video is now a permanent part of our societal record, a video that will never be fully removed. A video that will surely haunt the wife and children of the late Kirk.
Sadly, incidents like this are not without precedent. Consider that many adults have viewed the grainy, far-off videos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis climbing onto the back of a convertible on a sunny day in Dallas.
“People very rarely get killed at our house, and I’m trying to keep it that way,” penned Barbara Kingsolver in her 2003 collection of essays Small Wonder. She reflects briefly on the dangers of viewing violent or trivial content on our living room television sets, during a time in which the average TV viewing time was over three hours a day. Over the past twenty years, our time spent in front of a television has dipped a bit but thanks to the portability of digital devices, overall screen time has exploded.
I don’t even need to cite supporting facts and figures as this has become so well-known that you, the reader, nod along in agreement. So can we now, please, give more thought to what it is we are watching? Can we consider what formative role the content streamed on these devices is having on our young people? Can we stop telling our kids that if they are seeing something bad online they should “look away” and instead confront the reality that terrible things can be etched into our memories in milliseconds?
We have developed, at least in our view, a bit more decorum than the first-century Romans who made sport of such behavior.
In the modern, western world, we might shame anyone who wanted to buy tickets to watch two people fight to the death in an arena. We have developed, at least in our view, a bit more decorum than the first-century Romans who made sport of such behavior. Writing in Confessions, Augustine recounts the tragedy of watching his friend and student Alypius, a man who “had much natural disposition to goodness” be coaxed along by friends to attend a gladiatorial show. Augustine recounts,
When [Alypius] saw the blood, it was as though he had drunk a deep draught of savage passion. Instead of turning away, he fixed his eyes upon the scene and drank in all its frenzy, unaware of what he was doing. He reveled in the wickedness of the fighting and was drunk with the fascination of bloodshed. He was no longer the man who had come to the arena, but simply one of the crowd which he had joined, a fit companion for the friends who had brought him.
When we consider the violent content that most of our boys and young men are being exposed to via video games and real-life tragedies that have gone viral on social media, do we look much different than the citizens of the Roman Empire? When potentially millions of school children are viewing horrific acts online and the public outcry barely makes mention of removing access to internet connected devices, aren’t we in essence just “one of the crowd,” allowing the modern-day equivalent of gladiatorial shows to stream into our young people’s minds?
Glenn Sunshine, author of Why You Think The Way You Do writes, “The Greeks and Romans also engaged in human sacrifices in their earlier history…. to honor the gods or curry their favor, it was perfectly appropriate to kill those whom the society deemed expendable.” As this cultish practice came to a close, another took its place. Romans “picked up the Etruscan practice of having people fight to the death in ‘games’,” recounts Sunshine. Gladiatorial matches in turn became “a form of popular entertainment.”
I believe it is fair to say that the popular entertainment of our day isn’t much different than this. The suspect in Kirk’s case has been widely reported to be an avid video game player, having logged thousands of hours on first-person shooter games. Additionally, it has been reported that he has a preference for communicating on Discord servers, an app that is well known for being a haven for predators and creeps. While the suspect has been charged with “aggravated assault” in part because the crime was committed in front of children, I doubt anyone will be charged with “aggravated assault” on behalf of the potentially millions of children who have, and will continue to, witness the digitized version of the crime.
After all, who would we charge for the crime of spreading this terror across the internet and into the eyes of our young people? Who would we hold accountable? The social media companies that have hid behind Section 230 of the Federal Communications Act for years, claiming no responsibility for what minors are exposed to on their addictive, algorithm-controlled platforms? Or the politicians that have failed to enact real age restrictions for online platforms like those found in the proposed KOSA legislation? Or the parents who are shockingly unaware of or unable to act on the dangers minors are exposed to online?
As a society, we can’t continue to throw our hands in the air and accept defeat because we don’t see a clear path to change. We must do everything we can to protect our children, both those who witnessed a violent act mere feet from where they stood and those who sit in quiet corners watching a constant stream of violence in the palm of their hand. A culture where this is normal, is not a culture that fosters healthy children—or adults.
Image Credit: Józef Chełmoński, “Thunderstorm” (1896) via Wikimedia.
1 comment
Rob G
Thanks for this, a great take that rightfully eschews the partisan trappings that often cloud this debate.
Back in the 70’s when there was a lot of concern about the increase of sex and violence on TV, it was notable that it was primarily the “right” that was warning about the sex, while the “left” seemed more concerned about the violence. Even as a high school student at the time that struck me as odd, although I couldn’t have located the causes. My thought was shouldn’t we be equally concerned about both?
Now here we are 50 years later, and both areas of concern have grown into gigantic worldwide problems, partly because they weren’t addressed in any sort of unified systematic fashion at the time.