Doing Hard Things is… Hard. But Not Impossible.
This Wednesday morning my wife and I went up a mountain to see America at its best. We came down to find it at its worst.
We left in the morning to climb up Saddle Mountain in western Oregon, a glorious four- hour trek past Douglas firs, bittercress, violet, butterflies and mountain meadows to a view of unspoiled wilderness.
We left energized by the joy of doing something hard, feeling a bond with the other people we saw along the way, amazed by the beauty of the place, and grateful for the people who have worked to make sure places like that still exist.
Team Glock isn’t a real team; it’s a marketing slogan designed to convince more people to buy semi-automatic pistols.
The first stop we made on the way out was at a convenience store that proudly invited us to join “Team Glock,” and offered us the chance to buy a wide variety of assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols.
A few minutes later we heard the news that Charlie Kirk had been killed at a college in Utah. Then the news of another school shooting, at a high school in Colorado – the 357th mass shooting so far this year.
Since then there’s been so much that has been written about Charlie Kirk’s death – 100 analyses. For me there are two indisputable messages.
We gotta do something about guns. I grew up in the southern part of the US. Still live there. So I know a lot of people read the “well-regulated militia” part of the US Constitution to mean that everybody should be their own militia and have as many unregulated guns as they want, but there’s just no way this is what the founders intended, and no way a reasonable person could think our current gun policy makes sense.
We have a ridiculous number of guns in the US (since we don’t actually keep up with them, best estimates are 400-500 million) and every day we use them to kill 125 people-- ourselves, our friends, our family or other random people on the street.
We wound another 200 every day. The death rate by gun in the US is 26 times higher than in other wealthy nations across the world. I recognize that “people kill people,” but guns are what people use to kill other people. They just make it all so easy.
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. But people use guns to kill people.
The gun lobby will oppose the idea of anything that makes gun ownership even close to “well-regulated” but maybe this latest round of shootings will make it possible to discuss the smallest of tweaks. Don’t let civilians buy military rifles like the kind used to shoot Charlie Kirk. And until Glock makes it impossible to turn their semi-automatic pistols into automatic weapons that make school shootings possible, don’t let them be sold here.
We are required to renew our driver’s licenses every few years. Why can’t we do the same with guns?
We gotta learn to talk to each other. A survey released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) the morning Charlie Kirk was killed found that 34% of college students (up from 20% three years ago) believed it was ok to use violence to silence speech they disagreed with. It’s the latest in a string of data documenting how violently we disagree with one another over politics in this country. We don’t love our own political parties any more than we used to, the surveys find –but we hate the other party more. And polling shows a majority of people of both parties consider people from the other party “immoral,” “close-minded,” “Ignorant” and “dishonest.”
When that many people feel that strongly, political violence seems almost inevitable. It makes one group want to storm the Capitol. It gives an attacker the justification he needs to break in to the House Speaker’s home and beat her husband; another to set fire to the Pennsylvania Governor’s house; another to shoot and kill a member of the Minnesota State Legislature and her husband; another to try to kill the President. And, on Wednesday, it apparently convinced somebody to try to kill Charlie Kirk because he was trying to engage in actual dialogue about political differences.
Charlie Kirk welcomed dialogue with people who disagreed with him. His catch phrase was “prove me wrong.”
It's painful this week to read Kirk’s words from an earlier interview:
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think that the other side is evil and they lose their humanity. What we have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option.” Charlie Kirk
Maybe these murders, this week, are the killings that will get us serious about doing something about guns in our country. Maybe these are the deaths that will convince us that violence should not be an option when we disagree with someone.
“Team Glock” is not a team; it’s a marketing slogan designed to send the message that we are in this life on our own; that no one, not our “well-regulated” law enforcement or military can protect us; that it’s every man for himself and the more Glocks the better.
The alternative sounds a lot more attractive. We could double down on interdependence and begin the hard work of rebuilding trust. When political leaders and regular people come together, we’ve proven in the past that we can pull off the unlikely, against the odds. I learned that again this week from a mountain.
Protecting a mountain takes constant work across party lines. It’s working in Oregon.
This is how hard it was to build and protect and maintain the trail that we climbed earlier this week. In the mid-1930’s, in the middle of the Great Depression, a few citizens decided to give up part of their land to protect a mountain. The government hired unemployed Americans as part of a Civilian Conservation Corps to carve a trail that regular people could follow. Since then, they’ve protected the trees from Oregon loggers, the rocks from miners, the plateaus from developers, and the summit from cell towers, all so regular people can climb up and be reminded of the majesty of this amazing country.
All that was – and continues to be – hard work. But throughout our history we Americans have found a way to do hard things.
We’re being called this week to find a way to do more hard things. We should try – before it’s too late.
Notes:
College students on using violence to silence speech: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/college-students-increasingly-believe
Mass shooting tracker: https://massshootingtracker.site
Mass shootings in the US: https://www.boneconnector.com/writings/spirit-loneliness-mass-shootings
Some stats on gun violence: https://everytownresearch.org/report/gun-violence-in-america/?_gl=1*2g3cgc*_ga*MTUzMzAyMTUzNy4xNzU3Njg1NjUw*_ga_68QYBV181T*czE3NTc2ODU2NDkkbzEkZzAkdDE3NTc2ODU2NDkkajYwJGwwJGgw*_ga_1FTV9KT752*czE3NTc2ODU2NDkkbzEkZzAkdDE3NTc2ODU2NDkkajYwJGwwJGgw
Colorado school shooting: https://www.9news.com/article/news/crime/evergreen-shooter-posted-photo-of-handgun-to-social-media-before-shooting/73-e232c28e-7ffb-43a9-b424-f0d27fdba51c
Distrust of opposite party: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-hostility-grows-signs-of-frustration-with-the-two-party-system/pp_2022-08-09_partisan-hostility_00-01-png/
We hate people in the other party more than we used to: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cultural-animal/202305/why-do-republicans-and-democrats-hate-each-other
Charlie Kirk on political violence: https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/11/media/charlie-kirk-assassination-political-violence-democracy
History of Saddle Mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_Mountain_State_Natural_Area