Charlie Kirk spent his career showing up where he wasn’t welcome. Mostly on college campuses, where he would set up a tent and invite students to argue with him. At 31, the Turning Point USA founder and father of two was fatally shot Wednesday afternoon while doing what he had built his career around for more than a decade: encouraging dialogue over violence and shouting matches.

Kirk believed deeply that “when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts. When marriages stop talking, divorce happens. When civilizations stop talking, civil war ensues. What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option.”

The only rational response to such an act of terror is sympathy. Keep the political statements in your pocket. But the response to Kirk’s death has been depressingly predictable. Within hours, partisan actors on both sides weaponized the tragedy for political gain. Some Republicans immediately declared war on liberal extremism, despite no known suspect or motive for the shooting. Some Democrats focused more on relitigating Kirk’s rhetoric than mourning his death.

This is our test as a civil society: Can we protect those we despise and refuse to use our losses to score political points? We are failing spectacularly.

I always thought Kirk argued with cherry-picked facts that supported his agenda. His debate style involved talking fast and self-righteously to overwhelm intimidated college students. But personal disagreement becomes irrelevant when someone dies for their political beliefs. The important thing to recognize — and this requires looking above the mess of social media and ordinary life — is that many Americans no longer accept that, in a free society, nobody should die for their political beliefs, no matter how wrong those beliefs might be.

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