Conservative American thinker Charlie Kirk has been shot and killed in Utah.

The founder of Turning Point USA had been delivering a talk to students at Utah Valley University when a gunman opened fire, striking Kirk in the neck once. Kirk was rushed to a local hospital where he was later pronounced dead.

Immediately after the shooting, President Trump took to social media to say, “Charlie Kirk is one of the finest people I know,” and asked Americans to “pray for Charlie Kirk”. Vice-President Vance commented, “Dear God, protect Charlie Kirk in his darkest hour.” President Trump later told Americans that Kirk had died.

Charlie Kirk was the founder of Turning Point USA, which educated people at high schools and universities about limited government, free markets, and freedom. He rose to prominence as a particularly influential thinker at the height of America’s culture wars. Left-wing activists in America had long directed threats at Kirk, who was a devout Christian, and his organisation.

The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, and US Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said that their agents were on the scene of the shooting in support of the response and investigation.

The death of Kirk is likely to send shockwaves through American society and sharpen tensions in that already deeply divided country.

Richard Tren, who heads the Yorktown Foundation for Freedom in Washington, DC, told The Common Sense, “this is an appalling time for intolerance of ideas that are mainstream in much of the world and in much of America.”

Joel Pollak, who serves as senior editor at large for Breitbart News in America, told The Common Sense that the shooting, “is the result of an uneven application of moral outrage to the right rather than the left when it comes to violent rhetoric. Democrats and their media outlets faced no reckoning after the baseball shooting in 2017, or the Trump assassination attempts last year. No soul-searching, no civility, no purges from mainstream outlets. The left reserves the right to use violent rhetoric because they believe they are fighting for a higher good.”