The Killing of Charlie Kirk and Annual Traffic Fatalities—or the Difference Between Theory and Practice

So unless you live under a rock, on Mars, with your hands over your ears and your eyes firmly shut… you’ve heard about the killing of podcaster Charlie Kirk at his speaking event in Utah. So why am I talking about this on FreeMoveCity? Well, it’s relevant—theoretically.

Among many of Kirk’s famous, and now infamous, his statement on America’s Second Amendment stands out:

 “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” —Kirk, 2023

Now that he is one of those statistics, it’s worth examining this statement as a baseline study of theory versus practice.

In theory, Kirk stands and stood by this statement.

In practice, we could well imagine the last thought that ran through his mind was, “Oh—I didn’t mean ME.”

And that’s the dichotomy, folks. It’s easy to say: “Listen, we can’t save everybody…” and a lot harder to swallow the pill when the person sacrificed to the Second Amendment is you, or someone you love.

And we see the exact same discussion on traffic fatalities.

Vision Zero, and international organization devoted to eliminating ALL traffic fatalities, is often criticized as presenting an unrealistic goal.

You could imagine a similar statement:

“I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some traffic deaths every single year…”

Because it’s easy to say, yeah, we can’t save everybody.

Harder when it’s your child run over at a crosswalk; or when it’s you getting T-boned at an intersection on your way to work.

Because it’s not longer a statistic then, is it? No. it’s a tragedy.

In the past year, Helsinki, Finland, has recorded ZERO traffic fatalities. Vision Zero achieved, in a city of 1.5 million people.

If they did it, so can everybody else. Because we don’t have to accept any deaths to have a FreeMoveCity.

And no, Charlie, I disagree. We didn’t have to accept your death, or the countless others either.

We can do better. Because as they say, in theory there’s no difference between theory and practice.

But in practice, there is.