The fatal shooting of conservative icon Charlie Kirk was not a random act of violence but a carefully planned operation to "muzzle us by killing us," political strategist Dick Morris told Newsmax Saturday.
"This was a targeted, planned assassination by a shooter who was capable of hitting a jugular vein at 200 yards with a regular rifle with a scope and taking just one shot to do it," Morris told Newsmax's "The Count." "Someone with that skill and that training did this assassination, and I don't care that [he] was 22 years old or anything. It certainly is possible to program people to be good, to do that for the rest."
The intent of Kirk's slaying went beyond silencing not just one person but the whole conservative movement, Morris added.
"The important point is that this is an attempt to muzzle us by killing us," he said. "This is an attempt to take not just a political leader, not even just a spiritual leader, but an advocate, someone who speaks up for us and communicates with the rest of the world, particularly young people, and an effort to kill him."
And that, said Morris, "presages an effort to kill a lot of us. I think it's the ultimate response of the left to the effectiveness of the conservative movement."
Morris pointed to comments made by Kirk's widow, Erika Kirk, who said that there are "evildoers responsible for my husband's assassination" to underscore his argument that there were multiple actors involved in the shooting, even though just one suspect, Tyler Robinson, 22, has been arrested.
"Well, there clearly is more than one," Morris said. "Even if there's only one finger on the trigger, even if there was only one gunshot, it took planning to orchestrate a murder in front of 3,000 people on a college campus with a single-shot rifle from 200 yards away and to escape so dexterously and so skillfully that it's only when you confess to your family at the dinner table and they responsibly reported it that you get caught."
Whether accomplices were playing a direct role in the shooting or if they simply supported the killer is beside the point, he said.
"The idea is that they are after us and they're after us as advocates, as people who advance a point of view," said Morris. "The fact that Charlie's point of view was love and Christ-centric and focused on spirituality is unfortunately not relevant."
Kirk, Morris added, was "exercising political influence over a large population in a very important way. And the only way to stop that was to murder him."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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