The video appears to show students moving throughout the classroom while taking turns watching a video that shows the moment Kirk was shot in the neck while speaking at a college campus event. The students are stunned as the video plays. The student filming asks, “Why are we cheering for someone getting shot? … We should not be cheering as a class that someone got shot. He has a family.”
“So did those little kids that got shot,” another student responds, a rebuttal that has been made popular by some Democrats frustrated with conservative inaction following mass school shootings. Kirk was an outspoken proponent of the Second Amendment, and once said he believed it was “worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year” to maintain the right to possess firearms.
On TikTok, the video has received 363,000 views. A follow-up video, in which the student filming says she was asked to take the discussion outside of the classroom by a professor, has been watched 1 million times. The video was reposted by a conservative social media account and has garnered an additional 11 million views.
On Thursday afternoon, Republican state House Rep. Andy Hopper reposted the video, stating that his office had been in contact with UNT President Harrison Keller about the clip.
.@UNTsocial is in #HD64 and our office has been in contact with @UNTPrez about this. https://t.co/xAqosbkzsy
— Andy Hopper (@AndyHopperTX) September 11, 2025
“If you can't behave in a civilized fashion either as a student or a TA/prof, you should not be working at or enrolled in our public universities,” Hopper later posted to X.
Shortly after Hopper’s post, UNT released a statement calling for students and community members to “uphold the integrity and values of the university.” Seemingly referencing the video in question, the statement adds that “the recent actions of a few of our community members regarding Mr. Kirk’s death do not represent the values of our community.” The campus described the shooting death as “shocking” and pointed out that Kirk’s college campus tour visited UNT last year.
In an interview with right-leaning publication Texas Scorecard, Hopper said “the facts are as yet not fully clear on what transpired after the video,” but that if the student was asked to leave the classroom, the professor “should expect to no longer be employed by an institution funded with our tax dollars.” A University of North Texas spokesperson could not be immediately reached for comment.
Controversy in Cowtown
Expressing a less-than-sympathetic response to the shooting on social media has landed people everywhere in trouble, it seems. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer said she would try to ruin the careers of any person who made light of Kirk’s death, and many conservatives have seemed to make good on that promise.An MSNBC analyst, Matthew Dowd, has been fired for remarks made on the air immediately following the shooting that the network has called “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.” In Florida, a reporter has been suspended for asking a Congress member if Kirk’s shooting has changed the representative’s stance on gun control. Higher education faculty members in Tennessee and Mississippi have been fired for posting or resharing “insensitive” content following the shooting, and Baylor University has denounced a graduate student who appeared to post “this made me giggle” in reference to Kirk’s death.
In Fort Worth, a post by City Council member Elizabeth Beck has drawn the attention and vitriol of conservatives. Beck appeared to share, and later deleted, a news article discussing Kirk’s belief that deaths are a necessary consequence of upholding the Second Amendment and wrote “unfortunate” over a photo of Kirk.
In response to the backlash to the post, Beck called for an end to political violence.
"We are now witnessing a symptom of a bigger problem — extreme tribalism. As a society, we seek out reasons to be angry at each other, as opposed to starting from a place of commonality. My thoughts on political violence are clear, '[it] cannot and should not be tolerated in this nation. Left. Right. Center. Period.' We must have a serious discussion on how we engage in discourse and what has become acceptable or unacceptable," the statement, posted by WFAA, says.
Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker released her own statement Thursday that urges elected officials to encourage “civility, kindness, and decency” in their public statements. Elected officials have a duty to stay “above the board,” the statement added.
“Yesterday we saw the worst example of this by one of my fellow Council Members, essentially condoning violence because of someone's political views. It is very clear that the killing of Charlie Kirk was a political assassination, and there is no justification for evil,” Parker said.
