Credit: Wikimedia Commons
One point that has been made repeatedly over the last 48 hours is that Charlie Kirk was assassinated while exercising one of our most basic rights, the right to free speech.
When Kirk visited college campuses, he was not protesting, he was engaging in peaceful, intellectual discussions, question and answer sessions and/or debate with students who participated freely.
So how would anyone think of killing him for doing this? Well, a survey which was released just a day before Kirk was murdered, shows that an astonishing number of college students believe that violence is an acceptable way to stop campus speech they don’t like.
The College Fix reported:
1 in 3 students say some level of violence acceptable to stop campus speech
One in three students believe some level of violence is acceptable to stop a campus speech, according to the results of a large-scale survey released Tuesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The survey, which questioned more than 68,000 students at 257 colleges and universities nationwide on a variety of free speech topics, asked: “How acceptable would you say it is for students to engage in the following actions to protest a campus speaker? Using violence to stop a campus speech.”
Two percent said “always acceptable,” 13 percent said “sometimes acceptable,” and 19 percent said “rarely acceptable,” or about one-third of those surveyed.
When broken down by political beliefs, 7 percent of students who identified as liberal said it’s “always acceptable” to use violence to shut down speech — while 8 percent of students who identified as conservative did.
“More students than ever think violence and chaos are acceptable alternatives to peaceful protest,” FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens said in a news release. “This finding cuts across partisan lines. It is not a liberal or conservative problem — it’s an American problem.”
“Students see speech that they oppose as threatening, and their overblown response contributes to a volatile political climate.”
A majority of students surveyed — 54 percent — also responded it was acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech: 3 percent said “always acceptable,” 19 percent said “sometimes acceptable,” and 32 percent said “rarely acceptable.”
This is an indictment of our entire system of education. Schools are failing to educate our students about our most basic God-given rights and the respect that they deserve, especially in an education setting.
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