America’s Gun Violence Epidemic Doesn’t Map Neatly On to Our Politics

By Jacob Weindling  |  September 12, 2025 | 11:52am
Photo by Federal Bureau of Investigation
Big Story Gun Control
America’s Gun Violence Epidemic Doesn’t Map Neatly On to Our Politics

U.S. and Utah law enforcement announced today they arrested Tyler Robinson in connection with the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, nearly 24 hours after the right-wing was talking about Reichstag Fires and civil wars and such. They so badly wanted it to be some antifa leftist that they just accepted it as a fact like gravity before the suspect had even been caught. It’s a disturbing time in our politics, to see Democratic governors lowering their flags to half-mast for Charlie Kirk, all while some of the most influential accounts on the MechaHitler site are openly calling for more violence as the president says, “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.”

But based on what we know right now, Robinson’s politics do not map neatly on to anything other than a deep well of internet irony poisoning. This is going to be a very difficult case for people in the media not well-versed in deep cuts of internet culture, and table stakes to understanding Robinson’s “notices, bulges, OwO what’s this?” nomenclature is knowing what a wojak is. He allegedly wrote that phrase on the shell casing of the bullet that killed Kirk.

“Hey fascist! Catch!” read one of the unfired shell casings, giving the right the justification they needed to do what they were going to do anyway. But this phrase was followed by an up arrow, a right arrow, and three down arrows, providing a window into the video game irony poisoning in all this trollish phrasing. “Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao” read another unfired casing, which could be a reference to the occupied Italian anthem for the opposition to the Nazis in World War II, or some deeper internet lore I have yet to poison my brain with (right as I clicked publish and went to Bluesky to share it, I saw this series of 4chan screenshots saying it’s a song in a groyper playlist, another word that is table stakes to understanding anything here). “If you read this, you are gay LMAO” read a third casing.

And in a way he engraved that stuff so it would be solemnly read at a presser like that. Maybe there’s something to the argument going back to Columbine days to try to largely ignore self mythology  from violent killers and mass shooters etc

— Jacqueline Sweet (@jsweetli.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 8:57 AM

National political reporters: consult your gaming desk. You likely have a massively blind spot — this isn’t a dig at anyone, because I have this blind spot too b/c I’m not a gamer and am trying to adjust for it in real time — covering this very important moment if u don’t game & don’t know the memes

— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 9:41 AM

If you are confused about what Robinson’s ideology is, you are not alone, but there is a similar reference point in the recent past to help ground us. I imagine that there were also some right wingers gearing up for Civil War 2 in 1981 when they learned that someone shot Ronald Reagan, and they must have been very confused when John Hinckley Jr. said he did it to impress Jodie Foster. Those of us in politics are in the minority in America, and our celebrity culture reigns supreme.

And the internet and streamers are modern celebrity culture. The most we can say for certain about these cutesy phrasings on these shell casings, other than they’re so clearly irony-pilled you cannot take them at face value, is that they are rooted in internet culture. Hop on any Twitch stream and you will inevitably see “OwO what’s this?” in the chat. The shooter may have had leftist sympathies, and if so, he has no place in the tent we are trying to grow, but the shooter may have also wanted people to think they had leftist sympathies. This was a deliberate act to scrawl these messages like this, and so the natural question we must ask is why.

But answering it is another thing entirely that a non-hollowed out FBI not wholly dependent on tips from the suspect’s father would be able to do. Maybe Robinson is inspired by Hinckley and wanted to get the attention of some female streamer and this has nothing to do with his politics and these messages are about hers. Getting inside the mind of someone willing to throw their entire life away so they can murder Charlie Kirk is quite difficult, and the right-wing will no doubt take the “fascist” casing at face value and run with it. This possibility cannot be dismissed, but this is also a situation where if you are not deeply enmeshed in internet and video game culture, you quite literally do not speak the language required to understand this. I barely do. I will be consulting our experts at EndlessMode in my coverage on Robinson going forward, because I guarantee you that our video game desk has a better handle on Robinson’s personality than our political desk does. When I asked Garrett Martin, editor-in-chief of EndlessMode who had not seen the inscriptions on the bullet casings yet, what he thought, his initial reaction was “so he’s just some 4chan dope doing it for the lolz then.”

If this is some 4chan right-winger, this delves back into the political world of my expertise. There was actually fervent opposition to Charlie Kirk–from his right. The antisemite welcome at the White House, Nick Fuentes, built an entire career out of essentially being a more right-wing version of Kirk, and he constantly lambasted him for being too soft. This led to a pretty fervent group of Fuentes-viewing antisemites who despised Kirk and thought he held the movement back. If Robinson is a right-winger, there is a logical place for him to come from. And according to those woke scolds at the…uh…Cato Institute, there is one group in America predominantly responsible for political violence.

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— Matthew Stiegler (@matthewstiegler.bsky.social) September 11, 2025 at 4:48 PM

Or maybe Robinson has no discernable politics outside doing it for the lolz–his parents said he had only “recently” become political, after all. This is why a knowledge of internet and video game culture is going to be paramount in understanding his motivations, because our partisan lines drawn in the 20th century have no purchase in this new irony-poisoned world. I can’t think of a medium worse equipped to understand Robinson than cable news, as the only thing those hairpieces know about the internet are all the people in their mentions yelling at them. Do not turn on your TV to try to understand this case, you have to go to the web, the closer to video games the better.

Republicans will scream that we have a mental health crisis after passing a bill that slashes mental health support, and even though they clearly don’t give a shit, their bad faith argument has merit, and it invites disaster when combined with guns. The ubiquity of guns is the problem, and when people who are clearly unwell have easier access to firearms than to help, it’s a recipe for tragedy. Shootings like this or the mass shooter who recently targeted children in a Minnesota church or the 16-year-old right-wing mass shooter who shot up a school in Evergreen, Colorado twenty minutes after Charlie Kirk got shot could be prevented in a country with stricter gun control and far better mental health resources. It’s just not the country that Republican policymakers want to live in.

 
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