Driving home from work in the small Utah city of Orem, David Young tells Euronews that the area is filled with “all different faiths and types of people, and pretty much every type of person you can imagine.”
“But it is a family neighbourhood,” Young quickly adds.
Young is the mayor of the 100,000-person town which became the centre of global media attention last week, when a conservative influencer and commentator was shot dead in front of a large crowd during an event at Utah Valley University, before their very eyes.
Brushing off a near collision as he drove past his constituents, the mayor still sounded like he was processing the events of the previous week.
“I mean, we rarely have murders. We don’t have hardly any crime. We see it on TV, and we see other places that have it, but we don’t have that here. It’s such a foreign thing.”
His words were almost identical in tone to local state representative Nelson T Abbott, who spoke to Euronews separately.
“You hear about things like this across the world or across the country, but not in, not in Orem, Utah. This isn’t the way we do things here,” Abbott said.
It wasn’t just politicians who spoke like this. One resident said that despite its size, people in Orem “consider ourselves to be small town … a college town” vibrant and filled with young people. This, he said, just added to a sense of shock.
In the wake of Kirk’s murder, people on both sides of the political divide have become embroiled in an escalating war of words, a scuffle that people in Orem say they are trying to ignore.
‘This doesn’t represent our community’
During Euronews’** long conversation with Mayor Young, he admitted that the role he has assumed after the killing has fundamentally changed. He was used to dealing with the local media, but not national and even international attention.
Describing himself as a “politician in theory, but not really,” he had wanted to run the city like he had run his business, but recent events changed things dramatically. Young brought up a vigil for Kirk, which he spoke at in the town attended by thousands on 11 September, the day after the shooting.
“There were over 3,000 people that showed up for that. And so I was speaking at that. It was a difficult experience because to look at it out into that crowd and a lot of young people and just to see the sadness in their faces and tears in their eyes, I’ve never given a speech to a group like that.”
The mayor called for unity, as did the congressman in Washington representing the city, Mike Kennedy, who spoke exclusively to Euronews and contended that “the story of America has always been the story of people who, though deeply divided, chose unity over bitterness, hope over despair.”
A resident named Robert told Euronews that the town had felt relatively united in the aftermath. “Everyone’s just sad that some guy who is a dad and a husband and was out trying to do what he believed in and was senselessly shot 10 blocks from where we are.”
Politicians in Utah from all levels have often eschewed the vitriol of the wider debate nationally and online. The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, was praised by residents, as well as both Republicans and, though more mutedly, Democrats for his response, calling for calm.
On the streets of Orem, at least, State Representative Abbott suggested people had heeded those calls. “Kids are still playing out on the street. You see college students walking down the road or riding their bikes. People are not really seeing the world that much differently.”
“Our response to this tragedy has been to stand together and continue that story (of unity),” Kennedy concluded.
Yet, you don’t have to go far from the city to find a less cohesive picture.
‘A lot of anger and hurt’
Just a few dozen kilometres north in the state capital, senior Democratic State Representative Sahar Hayes provides a very different picture.
“It’s kind of a scary time to be a Democrat in Utah right now,” she explains to Euronews, describing “expletive-laden” voice mail messages and even death threats she and her colleagues had received in the preceding days.
Although this has become par for the course for politicians on both sides today, she says the volume of abuse and extremity of its content was “unprecedented”.
In messages shared with Euronews, one person accused the state representative — who is the only openly gay member and one of a tiny minority of Democrats in the Utah legislature — and her peers of being “murderous, paedophile, weirdo … gay rights” supporters.
The Democratic Party accounts for less than 20% of the entire legislature. Another called for a law in the name of Charlie Kirk to bring back public executions outside the legislature, offering tips on how to build gallows.
Hayes added that she and other members of the state’s LGBTQ+ community have felt particularly targeted, due to swirling media stories about the shooter’s relationship with his roommate, who is transgender.
“I just think it’s unfortunate that Tyler Robinson’s roommate is being dragged into this at all because we don’t even know if they have come out to their family. It really it feels like it’s painting a targeted narrative because they didn’t shoot anybody,” Hayes pondered.
In a related point, she talked about Kirk’s own language about the LGBTQ+ community, and concern that people were being targeted because they believed in her view that it was “okay to not mourn somebody who actively fought against your own your own humanity.”
According to the state representative, the blame for this lay at the door of the Trump administration, whose language she saw as “fanning the flames,” pointing to the cancellation of the popular late-night show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel after he criticised Trump’s muted reaction to Kirk’s in a comedic monologue.
She wasn’t the only one. Michael, a self-described conservative from a liberal-leaning family, who attended Utah Valley University and “agreed with 75% of what Kirk said,” argued that “sides were tending to default to the same mistake of restricting speech or any liberty.”
He namedropped Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said she would “absolutely target” those propagating “hate speech” about Kirk.
Even representative Abbott was firm in his belief that “government does not have any role whatsoever in pursuing or charging criminally or taking action against people who have said inappropriate comments and made light of” Kirk’s killing.
Representatives of Trump’s administration, notably led by Vice President JD Vance — a self-professed close friend of Kirk’s — have by and large also called for national unity following Kirk’s assassination.
Vance himself said he was “desperate” for it as he guest-hosted the Charlie Kirk Show podcast on Monday.
However, the US vice president also said that people who celebrate Kirk’s killing need to be reported and held accountable.
“Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” Vance said. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
Meanwhile in Orem, the issue of free speech was eclipsed by another constitutional amendment.
A call to arms?
For its 100,000 residents, the city of Orem has four gun shops. As the mayor put it, “People own guns around here. I own guns, and we believe in the Second Amendment. We hunt a lot. We also want them for protection.”
Michael runs classes for handling weapons, including for children. “Everybody on the street has a firearm and we go shooting regularly. It’s just a neighbourhood activity,” he told Euronews.
Euronews spoke to representatives from all four stores, three of whom pointed to a rise in sales in the aftermath of the shooting at Utah Valley University.
Gunnies and Ready Gunner, which a representative from a rival store referred to as the “general convenience stores for guns,” said the rise in activity was “significant”.
“We probably sold twice as many firearms as normal last week, almost exclusively concealable handguns,” a store rep told Euronews, adding that it was a different demographic coming in.
“I would say 80% of our customers are probably 40 and older. Last week probably half of everybody coming through the doors was under 25.” Almost every one of them was a college student, they claimed.
“This changed a lot of our customers perspectives, that things like Kirk’s shooting happen everywhere it was just kind of eye-opening for a lot of people.”
Michael’s classes have now been fully booked out.
When Euronews spoke to someone at Ready Gunner, they told a similar story. “Oh yeah, sales have been way up,” they exclaimed, before ringing off. “I can’t speak now, I’m just so busy running background checks,” for the many new customers, the rep said.
The US-based Pew Research Centre published a report this year stating that 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the US in 2023, the last year with complete annual data available. Across the EU, which has roughly twice the population, that number hovers just under 7,000.
Yet in Utah, where almost half the residents reportedly own a firearm, few saw the guns as the problem. Even the democratic lawmaker referred to “gun safety” measures rather than any outright bans.
She did, however, posit that “Charlie Kirk would probably still be alive if the killer had a knife, right?”
“Like, if he’d lunged him on the stage, he would still be here,” Hayes said.
Back in Orem, Mayor Young disagreed.
“I don’t think it would have made a drop of difference, because that’s what the shooter wanted to do.”
