Khale Lenhart

The news for several weeks has been awash with coverage of the accidental shooting death of Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer working on a Western film with Alec Baldwin. The precise facts of how and why a live round ended up in a prop gun are still not entirely clear. What we do know is that, in a rehearsal, Alec Baldwin fired a gun that he had been told was “cold” — meaning that it did not have live rounds in it — but that actually contained a live round. When he fired the gun containing the live round, it struck Halyna Hutchins and director Joel Souza. Hutchins died later that day.

In the wake of this tragedy, some of the worst parts of our society came forward. Jokes were made about Alec Baldwin and the shooting death, largely based around his well-known liberal political beliefs. Donald Trump Jr. even began marketing a shirt saying “Guns Don’t Kill People. Alec Baldwin Kills People.” The schadenfreude displayed by some conservatives over Baldwin being involved in a shooting death was one of the low points of our recent times. 

What those making light of the situation forget — or worse, deliberately ignore — is that the incident involved real people. I knew Halyna Hutchins. Not well, but her husband and I were law school classmates. Halyna and my wife Sarah got to know each other relatively well while we were in school, as we were all parts of the relatively small community of married students at Harvard Law School.

I remember her as being very pleasant and having a fascinating background and ambitions. She was from the Ukraine and met her husband while she was in the United States on a student exchange. If I remember correctly, I believe she was working as an entertainment journalist at the time, and she had ambitions of going to California to work in the movie industry.

After we graduated and our paths no longer crossed, I still got to see snippets of her life through Facebook. I saw when she and her husband had their son. I followed along as she began working on films and rooted for her from afar as she began working on more prominent movies with more prominent actors. Occasionally, her husband and I would interact on Facebook — a comment or like on particularly poignant or significant events, although I would be exaggerating to say we were close. In any event, it was a surreal moment to learn about the tragedy and that it involved someone that I remembered well and liked.

With that backdrop, the cruelty of those making light of the situation was very apparent. Where I saw a person lost and a family struggling with their future, others saw only a political quip motivated by their own desire to see those on the “other side” suffer. For all the talk we conservatives do of being pro-life and pro-family, those making jokes were all too happy to ignore those principles as long as there were points to be made against someone on the other side. Celebrating a tragic death is not pro-life; laughing about the loss of a wife and mother is not pro-family. It is self-serving, callous and wrong.

Lest liberals get too comfortable, this behavior is also apparent in their community. I have seen a lot of smugness and “told you so” mentalities for those on the left when discussing unvaccinated or conservative people suffering from serious COVID illnesses and deaths. Although the circumstances may not be as dramatic, the behavior is the same. Too many are quick to celebrate the suffering of others, as long as they believe the others are politically different from them. It is a sad state of affairs in American life when we wish harm on fellow Americans over political differences.

We all need to be better.

I am sure I am not blameless about feeling some level of satisfaction at the misfortune of those I disagree with, and especially those I dislike. However, that attitude is harmful. It hurts those around us who may be suffering. It further entrenches divides between us. Perhaps most troubling, it hurts each of us who engage in the behavior. We become cold and indifferent to the suffering of the world. Without compassion, we lose our connection to our communities and the people around us.

The next time we see stories of tragedy suffered by those we might disagree with, I hope we will all be a little slower to celebrate and a little quicker to empathize with the people whose lives are impacted. It would do us all some good.

(Khale J. Lenhart is a partner at the law firm Hirst Applegate in Cheyenne, where he has practiced since 2011. He is a former chairman of the Laramie County Republican Party.)