I had the expected whipsaw of emotions on hearing about Charlie Kirk’s killing: “Yay. Oh I’m a terrible person for thinking that.” But I’m a clearer-minded person after a night’s sleep. I’ll tell you who I am.

I feel bad for his family, especially his children — they didn’t deserve this. They will never know someone who should be important in their lives.

I feel bad for the witnesses who will be brutally traumatized. And by that I mean both in person and who run across the video, unsuspecting.

I feel bad for those who, like my first reaction, will be unsettled by the moral question of, how is it OK if I am glad about a death?

But Charlie Kirk should, in a non-hypocritical world, be OK with his death. Some deaths are OK, he said, as a price to be paid for the Second Amendment. I’m sure he never expected the leopards to eat his face.

There’s an old morality problem called the Trolley Problem about people tied to a train track. A trolley is running toward a group of five people tied to the track and will kill them if it runs over them. But there’s a switch which will run the trolley onto a new track, and that track has only one person on it. Do you throw the switch, knowing that that makes you compliant in the one person’s death? Thinking about problems like this can keep you up at night. (Want to be provoked this way? Look for a book called “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” by Harvard professor Michael Sandel.)

I cannot be glad for the death of a human, a father, a husband, a son. But I can be relieved that one of the many stresses on our society is removed. I think the death of Charlie Kirk is the lesser of two evils: that he lives, or that he dies. I think the harm that he would do, alive, is greater than the harm of his death. I think his death, in the long run and in the indeterminable future, will save lives. When every life is a universe, five lives are more important than one life.

What if we could round up all the people who influence our society toward violence, and permanently remove them all? (Exile them to Mars, say.) Well, this would be wrong. Because if you left one of them home, what harm could one do? Or two? And who decides who is doing the inciting? Where’s the line? All these questions are valid. But there are some things you can point to and say, unequivocally, “This is bad and we will be better off if it goes away.”

I sorrow for the state of our democracy. But the only way I would be able to accept that this was an unequivocally wrong thing would be if someone could guarantee that this was the last political violence we would see in our lifetimes. Then, one less would matter. Until then, I won’t be crying hypocritical tears for one of the people who got us here.

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