A manhunt is underway for the shooter who killed the conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. Kirk founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA when he was just 18 years old, and played a crucial role in President Trump’s 2024 victory. Kirk was speaking outside, taking questions from the crowd, when he was killed by a single shot fired from a nearby rooftop on campus. Utah Governor Spencer Cox said, “I want to be very clear that this is a political assassination.” Here’s Scott Robbins, who witnessed the shooting.

Scott Robbins: “Absolute horrible event. You know, Charlie Kirk, he goes up there. He even has security to protect him from other extremists that have attacked him before from just debating them civilly. And so, people didn’t expect that kind of thing to happen.”

President Trump blamed the “radical left” for Kirk’s death before a suspect had been identified, and even tied the shooting to his own assassination attempt.

President Donald Trump: “From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Trump neglected to mention attacks on Democrats, including the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House, Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated in June.

Kirk was shot in the midst of talking about mass shootings. He was asked by an audience member about the number of transgender shooters in the country compared to the overall number of mass shooters, when a bullet hit him in the neck. In the past, Kirk repeatedly praised the Second Amendment and downplayed the seriousness of gun violence. Here’s what he said back in April 2023.

Charlie Kirk: “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am — I think it’s — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Kirk’s killing comes after the former FBI special agent in charge of Salt Lake City, Mehtab Syed, was forced out last month, after just six months on the job. The FBI field office of Salt Lake City is in charge of coordinating activities in the region. We’ll have more on this story later in the broadcast.