In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, conservatives are doing what they do best: pointing fingers at everything except the obvious. Social media? Video games? TikTok? Please. Guns are the problem, and everyone knows it.
Of course. Of course the first reaction from some conservatives after Charlie Kirk’s murder is to blame social media. Not the weapon that actually ended his life, not the system that makes it easier to buy a gun than cold medicine—nope. Twitter. Facebook. TikTok.
Because apparently, according to their logic, it wasn’t the bullet that killed him—it was a meme.
Let me be clear: social media has its problems. People spread lies, politicians stoke division, and the trolls are out in full force every day. But nobody has ever died from a retweet. Nobody ever walked into a grocery store with a “like” button and mowed down ten people. Guns kill people. And the sheer number of them in this country, combined with our pitiful excuse for gun laws, is why we’re drowning in blood.
But conservatives can’t admit that, can they? Because that would mean standing up to the NRA and their gun-worshipping base. So instead, they twist themselves into pretzels, blaming everything else under the sun. Social media. Mental health (that they refuse to fund). Even doors—remember when they blamed school shootings on too many doors? It would be funny if it weren’t so grotesque.
The reality is simple. Every other developed country has social media. Every other developed country has people arguing online, posting dumb takes, and spreading conspiracies. But they don’t have our level of mass shootings. The difference is the guns. Period. End of story.
So spare me the pearl-clutching about Instagram reels turning us into killers. The problem is the AR-15s, the Glocks, the endless parade of high-powered weapons in civilian hands. Until we admit that, until we confront it head-on, all the talk about social media is just noise—a distraction to avoid the real issue.
Blame the guns, not the tweets.
