by I listened to a commentary on CBS Sunday by James Fallows this morning. Fallows served at one time as President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter and as the national correspondent for The Atlantic. In other words, he is someone who might be considered literate and have a facility with words.
While I cannot disagree with his two takeaways from the assassination of Charlie Kirk – real life is less fractured than life as portrayed by social media and to be wary of immediate reactions – his use of the terms “gun killing” and “political gun murders” seem to me to be particularly awkward. It was the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk and not the rifle. The rifle was only the tool. Likewise, referring to the assassinations of figures ranging from Lincoln to Bobby Kennedy to Charlie Kirk as “political gun murders” gives precedence to the tool and not to the action.
Using Fallows’ lexicon, one would suppose that when an anti-Semite tried to murder Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro by the way of arson, that would be “attempted fire murder”.
Likewise, this past week we remembered the 24th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by Al Qaeda terrorists using stolen jet airliners. Instead of calling it terrorism, are we now to call it “political jet murders” or “airliner terrorism”?
Murder is murder. Terrorism is terrorism. The tool used is irrelevant. It is the intent of the evil doers that is what is important.