Look, if he did some actually criminal shit that I don’t know about, he should have been arrested, tried, and sentenced accordingly. That would have been justice. An individual simply choosing to kill him is murder from a vendetta. No accountability. No argument for others as to why he deserved it. It means he can’t be made into an example of a villain that we overcame as a society. He is instead made into a victim, so him and everything associated with him is treated with sympathy it should never have.

But as far as I know, he was hated for spreading ignorant shit ideas. Those can’t be defeated with a gun, and that is the real danger he represented. Bad ideas need to be identified as such to establish the person giving them as ignorant and not worth listening to. Gunning him down like this bolsters his arguments instead of dismantling them.

Celebrating the murder legitimizes it as a valid response for saying things that people don’t like, and that’s a dangerous precedent for anyone trying to change the state of things for the better.