On the Declining Accuracy of Political Violence: A Generational Assessment

Opinions I Would Only Express Under Duress

I don’t like to generalize about generations younger than my own. My parents’ generation used to do that to us, and I never respected it. But if I did have to comment, I’d say that young people are making the best of a bad situation, and leave it there. Of course, if you locked me in a cupboard and said: ‘Kris, I’m not letting you out of this cupboard until you criticize the youth of today’, then I’d probably admit that young people are hilariously bad at carrying out political assassinations.

Standards have fallen off, is what I’m saying. Of course, I never endorse political violence. It’s a serious matter, and I’m not making light of it. I am decidedly opposed to political violence, and I only mentioned it, here, because I was imagining being forced to say something, after being locked in a cupboard. Personally, I happen to think political violence is bad. I thought so even before a mob stormed the US Capitol and attacked police officers in a failed coup on January 6, 2021. I continued to oppose political violence even after the US president pardoned everyone involved. Political violence is bad, and evidently I believe that more strongly than the current American president.

I also happen to think that baby boomers, back in the day, or at least the mentally-unwell ones who undertook acts of political violence, had much better aim. And sometimes I wonder why that is. Also, whenever people start talking about video games making the youth of today more violent, I raise a finger and say, ‘Perhaps, but their aim is lousy.’

Now, this is all, obviously, a highly-sensitive topic, so let me start by addressing the elephant in the room. Obviously, I would never heap praise upon the baby boomer generation. That’s their job, not ours. We should strive to stay in lanes. As a generation, they were pioneers of political dissidence, promiscuity, stealing music from black people, self-adulation, and building real estate monopolies. It’s not our job to praise them; it’s our job to wait patiently for them to all die, then get to work on mitigating climate change.

Of course, it’s worth remembering that not all baby boomers are deranged. Some were active in the civil rights movement, and some are feminists. Some aren’t even racist. I love several who are wonderful human beings, but I never like to compliment them in case they get all uppish and start talking about the Sixties. Which is the worst. If they ever do that to you, cover your ears and say the words ‘trickle-down economics’ over and over, until they walk away.

But let’s return to the issue at hand. If you locked me in a cupboard and said to me, ‘Kris, you can’t come out until you say something nice about the baby boomers’, then I would admit, reluctantly, of course, that their generation of mentally-deranged, rifle-toting lunatics knew how to properly shoot people.

Since 2024, three mentally-unwell individuals have attempted to assassinate an American president — most recently, last weekend — and each time, those would-be assassins made a complete dog’s breakfast of it. And thank goodness, obviously. I find it all encouraging. People who are mentally-unwell being less capable of committing political violence is definitely a sign of progress. I don’t worry so much about video games making young people more violent, knowing that none of them could hit the side of a barn at point-blank range.

Speaking of video games, there’s one I played for hundreds of hours called Civilization VI, and if you ever want to ruin your productivity for a few months, I can heartily recommend it. The publisher, Firaxis, has released a more recent edition of the game, Civilization VII, but I didn’t buy it because the reviews were so poor. Apparently the game was released with all sorts of issues, and some critics complained the game was basically unplayable. And one of the curiously plausible reasons for this is that one of Civilization VI‘s essential bug testers, a young man named Luigi Mangione, was unavailable to work on Firaxis’ next title, having been arrested for the alleged assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare.

What follows is simply my opinion: Luigi is not the killer. I saw the photograph of the suspect taken from a security camera in Starbucks, and those eyebrows do not match Luigi’s. It seems more plausible, to me, that law enforcement was under tremendous political pressure to imprison someone — or indeed, anyone — and clearly, framing a young man who worked on video games is much less work. Again, this is only my personal opinion, but Luigi was framed. The real killer had to have been a mentally-unwell baby boomer, because he was such a good shot. It’s all just one big conspiracy, and that’s the grassy knoll I’m dying on.

Consider John Hinckley Jnr, who was born in 1955. He was deemed mentally ill and confined to an institution after he shot Ronald Reagan in 1981. But, of course, he did manage to shoot Reagan — or at least, he winged him. Yes, Ronald Reagan survived, and Americans have been struggling to understand the metric system ever since. But again, the would-be assassin was a baby boomer and (you have no idea how much this pains me to admit this) their generation of mentally-unwell political assassins could at least hit the side of a barn with a rifle.

Which makes me think of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Mind you, I’m not an expert and I only watched the footage several hundred times from different angles, but in my incredibly inexpert opinion, the shooter worked for Mossad (and I’ll explain why in a moment). Law enforcement officers captured a young person, and I don’t know what to think about that, because, after all, the Department of Justice still hasn’t released the Epstein Files.

Now, as you know, I’m a serious-minded individual who far too often errs on the side of solemnity. So when Charlie Kirk was shot through the neck — on a college campus, whilst speaking specifically about shootings on college campuses, and apparently about to argue that gang-violence was inflating the metric — I recognized immediately the seriousness of the moment. But sadly, few others did.

People danced after Charlie Kirk was shot. His widow, Erika Kirk, danced. She even danced with the American Vice President and wore leather pants for him, knowing he was a man who enjoys the feeling of expensive upholstery.

And watching her dance on television, I remember thinking that Charlie Kirk was indeed a rich man — and not simply because furthering fascist ideologies on college campuses is evidently a lucrative profession, judging by the significant number of billionaires who seem to admire Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. But, no … I realized Charlie Kirk was a rich man because he had secured that one, fabled objective that remains elusive for so many married men; he had made his wife happy. It’s just a shame he never lived to see it.

I also thought it was a shame that so many people seemed to want to celebrate his death. Some even set off fireworks, which was terrifically tasteless, in my opinion. Nobody should be so happy that Charlie Kirk was shot through the neck that they would set off fireworks. But I suppose the people who organized his memorial saw matters differently.

Still, if Charlie Kirk’s career taught us anything, it’s that many people out there are mentally-unwell, and some of them are actually dangerous. He also taught us that thoroughly researching a subject — say, violence on American college campuses — is boring and tedious, and would probably only undermine your entire argument, especially if that argument is ‘we should all be quiet and do what the billionaires tell us to do’.

That’s why, as a tribute to Charlie Kirk, I decided not to put any real research into this essay. It was more important, I felt, to ask myself how Charlie would want me to approach the subject of his assassination. Obviously, he’d want me to blame all the black women in America, but that’s just too stupid, so instead of that, I googled conspiracy theories, and after twenty seconds, found one about Charlie Kirk’s assassin working for Mossad, so I decided to stop there. As Charlie Kirk would probably have said (had he not been shot in the neck), spending more than twenty seconds researching any controversial issue is just overthinking it.

But once again, if you locked me in a cupboard and forced me to tell you, frankly, who I really thought was behind the killing, then I would undoubtedly say, ‘I don’t know, but it was probably some 79-year-old baby boomer’. Admittedly, my principal reason for saying that would be to persuade you to let me out of the cupboard.

Now I consider the matter, perhaps locking me in a cupboard might not be the best method to elicit an honest and heartfelt opinion. In fact, it may have been a mistake to have ever suggested it. I spent only twenty seconds thinking about it, and already I’ve started to see the limitations of this sort of clumsy, simplistic thinking. And imagine, some people manage to build entire careers this way.

So, in conclusion, I would like to assert that I do sincerely enjoy the occasional conspiracy theory, I really do, and particularly when they involve aliens. But if I was being honest, and if you sincerely promised not to lock me in a cupboard, then I would sheepishly admit that I don’t really blame the baby boomers for everything. After all, they have very good aim.

With chaste affection,

Kris St.Gabriel