The Wild Reed: A Simple and Brutal Truth

Saturday, September 13, 2025

A Simple and Brutal Truth

Closer to the Edge is a reader-supported publication on the Substack platform. It posted the following article yesterday.

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Tyler Robinson:
When the Gun Turns Inward

Closer to the Edge
September 12, 2025
Charlie Kirk spent years treating gun deaths as a “worth it” cost of freedom. On September 10, 2025, he died by a gun at Utah Valley University – mid-sentence, while talking about mass shootings.

Authorities say the shooter was Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old from Utah. Robinson wasn’t some radical leftist boogeyman as Trump immediately claimed. He wasn’t Antifa. He wasn’t a Democratic activist parachuting into Provo. He was the son of Republican parents – his father a hunter and small business owner, his mother a social worker. Robinson himself was registered non-partisan, but he had been getting more political lately, and not in Kirk’s favor. Friends and family said he spoke disparagingly about Kirk in the days before the shooting. Ammunition recovered reportedly carried phrases like “fascist” etched into the casings.

In 2017, Robinson dressed for Halloween in a gag costume – Donald Trump’s shoulders carrying him around, a parody suit with fake legs dangling. It’s an image that reads like foreshadowing: part satire, part homage, impossible to know where mockery ended and allegiance began. In hindsight, it only sharpens the contradictions – a young man raised in a Republican household, clowning in a Trump get-up, and now accused of turning his rifle on one of Trump’s loudest disciples.

Robinson evaded capture for 33 hours before being turned in by his own father after confessing to a family friend. He was arrested near St. George. A bolt-action rifle believed to be the murder weapon was found in the woods. Governor Spencer Cox said bluntly: “We got him.”

And yet, within minutes of Kirk’s death, Donald Trump declared it was the work of the “radical left.” No evidence. No facts. Just the familiar script: blame the left, declare conservatives victims, and move the narrative before reality catches up. That’s the con. Because reality points in the opposite direction: a young man from a conservative household, disgusted by a conservative firebrand, turned his gun inward.

That’s not “radical left.” That’s cannibalism. That’s a movement so poisoned by rage and paranoia that its violence doesn’t just spill outward anymore – it circles back on itself.

The truth is simple and brutal: Tyler Robinson wasn’t vanquishing an oppressor on behalf of the left. He wasn’t delivering justice for gun victims. He was a product of the same culture Kirk helped build – a culture that sneers at empathy, glorifies toughness, and treats violence as currency.

And in the end, that culture ate one of its own.