Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative media personality who helped to rally young people around traditional gender roles, was fatally shot during an event at Utah Valley University (UVU) on Wednesday afternoon. 

The 31-year-old was at the campus to launch his “The American Comeback Tour,” in which he encouraged audience members to debate him in a public setting. Kirk had been speaking for about 20 minutes and was going back and forth with a student about mass shootings involving transgender people when he was shot, according to videos of the attack. The shooter fired from a building about 200 yards away, according to a spokeswoman for the university. 

Kirk is survived by his wife and two children. 

Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to push for conservative politics on high school, college and university campuses. In the past decade, he has grown into a provocative conservative influencer who encouraged young women to have more babies instead of chasing careers, called for a ban on gender-affirming care and advocated for gun rights in spite of mass shooting fatalities. 

In 2023, Kirk was accused of defending and perpetuating antisemitic rhetoric and faced widespread condemnation from conservatives. But within a year, he was welcomed back into the Republican fold and asked to be the primetime speaker on the opening night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, where he highlighted the experiences of Gen Z and blamed Democrats for creating a country where “our young people own nothing and they are miserable.” Kirk said young men are the most conservative they’ve been in decades and praised President Donald Trump, saying he supported a country where young people can afford to buy homes, get married and have children. 

In June, Kirk spoke to thousands of women — mostly in their teens and 20s — at Turning Point USA’s 10th annual Young Women’s Leadership Summit. He told them to trade their feminism for femininity, ditch their professional aspirations and focus on finding a husband to fund being a stay-at-home mom. Kirk asked the audience to raise their hand if they’d rather have a good family than a good career — and nearly every hand raised. Kirk then told the women that everything they do on a daily basis should then point towards that goal. 

“If you’re not married by the age of 30, you only have a 50 percent chance of getting married,” Kirk said at the summit. “And if you don’t have kids by the age of 30, then you have a 50 percent chance of having kids. You should know that.”

On Wednesday, moments before Kirk was shot, a student asked Kirk if he knew how many mass shooters in the past 10 years have been transgender. Kirk responded, “Too many,” before the student pushed back, saying there had been only five. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been about 5,000 mass shootings since 2015. 

The exchange came two weeks after two children were killed and 21 injured at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. The shooter was identified by police as 23-year-old Robin Westman; several years ago Westman’s mother filed a court document indicating her child “identifies as female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” according to news outlets. That attack sparked conservative backlash against transgender people and reportedly led Justice Department officials to consider a potential ban on transgender people owning firearms.

Wednesday’s event was the first of two planned events this month at UVU for Kirk. According to Deseret News, more than 6,000 people had signed a petition asking Utah Valley University to prevent Kirk from coming to its campus later this month. 

Early reports indicated that a suspect was in custody, but UVU police later told reporters that was not the case.

In response to the shooting, conservative and liberal figures alike spoke out against the violence. Trump called for prayers on his social media platform, Truth Social, shortly after Kirk was shot and later announced Kirk’s death at 4:40 p.m. 

“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” Trump posted. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”

In comments to reporters, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson decried political violence, saying it “violates the core principles of our country, our Judeo-Christian heritage, our civil society, our American way of life, 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, and political violence must be called out, and it has to stop,” Johnson said. 

Gabrielle Giffords, a former Democratic congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt in 2011 when she was shot in the head, said in a statement that Kirk’s death broke her heart. Giffords mentioned that the summer has seen multiple politically motivated assassinations, including that of Democratic Rep. Melissa Hortman in Minnesota. 

“Democratic societies will always have political disagreements, but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence,” wrote Giffords, who started GIFFORDS, an anti-gun-violence advocacy organization after resigning from Congress following her recovery. “Attacks against political or ideological opponents are cowardly and un-American, and must be universally condemned.”