Utah Governor Spencer Cox, on Wednesday, spoke to reporters during a press conference to provide updates on the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
This is a dark day for our state. It’s a tragic day for our nation,” Governor Cox said. “I want to be very clear that this is a political assassination.”
“Charlie believed in the power of free speech and debate to shape ideas and to persuade people,” Cox continued, highlighting the foundation of Free Speech and debate, enshrined in the Constitution. He added, “when someone takes the life of a person because of their ideas or their ideals, then that very Constitutional foundation is threatened.”
On Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was shot in an assassination attempt while he was speaking at Utah Valley University.
A graphic video of the incident showed Kirk being hit in the neck before falling to the ground.
The 31-year-old political commentator, activist, and co-founder of Turning Point USA tragically passed away in the hospital hours after the terrorist attack during a stop on his “Prove Me Wrong” tour at the college campus. He is survived by his wife, Erika, and two children, a three-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy.
Authorities arrested a suspect, claiming to have shot Kirk, in the crowd immediately after the shooting, but it was later revealed that he was not the gunman. The suspect shot Kirk from a building roughly 200 yards away from where he was speaking. FBI Director Kash Patel announced this evening that they arrested another suspect, but the FBI did not identify the individual.
“I want to make it crystal clear right now: to whoever did this, we will find you, we will try you, and we will hold you accountable to the furthest extent of the law,” Cox said in a message to the shooter.
“And I just want to remind people that we still have the death penalty here in the state of Utah.”
He also responded to the depraved leftists who are celebrating Kirk’s murder. “If anyone in the sound of my voice celebrated even a little bit at the news of this shooting, I would beg you to look in the mirror and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere. I don’t care what his politics are. I care that he was an American,” he said, calling for prayer and real leadership in the country.
WATCH:
Cox: This is a dark day for our state. It’s a tragic day for our nation. I want to be very clear that this is a political assassination. We are celebrating 250 years of the founding of this great nation, that founding document, the Declaration of Independence, this great experiment on which we embarked together, 250 years ago, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. The first one of those is life, and today, a life was taken. Charlie Kirk was first and foremost, a husband and a dad to two young children. He was also very much politically involved, and that’s why he was here on campus.
Charlie believed in the power of free speech and debate to shape ideas and to persuade people. Historically, our university campuses in this nation and here in the state of Utah have been the place where truth and ideas are formulated and debated, and that’s what he does. He comes on college campuses and he debates. That is foundational to the formation of our country, to our most basic constitutional rights. And when someone takes the life of a person because of their ideas or their ideals, then that very Constitutional foundation is threatened.
Now, we have a person of interest in custody. The investigation is ongoing, but I want to make it crystal clear right now: to whoever did this, we will find you, we will try you, and we will hold you accountable to the furthest extent of the law. And I just want to remind people that we still have the death penalty here in the state of Utah. Our nation is broken. We’ve had political assassinations recently in Minnesota, we had an attempted assassination on the governor of Pennsylvania, and we had an attempted assassination on a presidential candidate and former President of the United States, and now current President of the United States. Nothing I say can unite us as a country. Nothing I can say right now can fix what is broken. Nothing I can say can bring back Charlie Kirk.
Our hearts are broken. We mourn with his wife, his children, his family, his friends. We mourn as a nation. If anyone in the sound of my voice celebrated even a little bit at the news of this shooting, I would beg you to look in the mirror and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere. I don’t care what his politics are. I care that he was an American. We desperately need our country. We desperately need leaders in our country, but more than the leaders, we just need every single person in this country to think about where we are and where we want to be, to ask ourselves, Is this? It is this What 250 years has wrought on us? I pray that that’s not the case. I pray that those who hated what Charlie Kirk stood for will put down their social media and their pens and pray for his family, and that all of us, all of us, will try to find a way to stop hating our fellow Americans.
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