Scrutiny over security at Charlie Kirk event: no bag checks, six cops, ‘anyone could walk in’
The fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, at an open-air event on a college campus with hundreds of people in attendance, has called into question whether security failures allowed a gunman to enter the school and fire from a nearby rooftop.
There did not appear to be any bag checks or security checkpoints for Wednesday’s event on the sprawling Utah Valley University campus, which covers more than 500 acres in Orem, Utah.
Six police officers were covering the outdoor area, where the Turning Point USA event was taking place, alongside Kirk’s private security detail. The university’s police chief told reporters Wednesday that there were also “some plainclothes police officers” among roughly 3,000 people in the crowd.
“We train for these things, and you think you have things covered, and these things, unfortunately, they happen,” Chief Jeff Long said. “You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately, … we didn’t. Because of that, we had this tragic incident.”
At a press conference Thursday morning, Utah Department of Public Safety commissioner Beau Mason said he could not speak to the event’s security, and stressed that his office and federal law enforcement were not involved in the planning.
The cost of having a large private security detail, in conjunction with local law enforcement, can be prohibitive, according to former FBI agent Michael Harrigan, an expert in threat assessment for global crisis and conflict consulting firm, PAX Group.
Open-air gatherings, like Kirk’s event, can be “very hard to secure,” but a security detail “does their best to try to minimize risks around the client’s requirements,” he told The Independent.
Long-distance shootings are “extremely difficult” to safeguard against, he said.
Whereas indoor venues can more easily add metal detectors and other measures, outdoor venues are “generally the most dangerous” places to hold events, Harrigan said.
What’s more, students in Utah are generally allowed to carry firearms on public college campuses if they have a valid concealed firearm permit, following a change in state law that went into effect in May.
“So the idea that there was a security checkpoint is a misnomer,” Katherine Schweit, a former FBI special agent and author of Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis and How to Talk About Guns With Anyone, told The Independent.
“Anytime somebody holds an event at a college campus in the United States, it is usual for campus police and security to look to provide some level of security, and that is done in coordination with the person who is the host,” she said.
“I don’t think it’s really accurate to say there were security lapses or mistakes made by security at the campus, because that would presume that there were plans that called for much more intense security, and that there were failures in those, and that just doesn’t exist here.”
Eyewitness Justin Hicken arrived at the event a few minutes before it started, with the crowd “packed into a little outdoor amphitheater,” he told The Independent.
“Unfortunately, there were no metal detectors or anything,” Hicken said.
There were no bag checks or body scans for people entering the event, according to Deseret News reporter Emma Pitts, who was covering Kirk’s event. “Nobody scanned our equipment, nobody scanned our bags, there was no security like that,” Pitts said.
Former Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz told Fox News that there was a “light” police presence at the event with “no security check going in.”
Tyler McGettigan, another attendee, told NBC News that the event required a ticket with a scannable code, but he did not need the ticket to enter the amphitheater.
“No one checked the barcode or the QR code,” he told the outlet. “There was no checkpoint to get in. It was literally, anyone could walk in if they wanted.”
Jeb Jacobi, a student who volunteered to work at the event, told NBC that two security guards were standing near the small tent which was shielding Kirk from the sun. Pictures and video from the scene show guards standing behind a seated Kirk while he faced the crowd.
Police officers also dispersed protesters Wednesday who had been setting up on a roof ahead of Kirk’s event, and they responded to the scene minutes after the conservative activist was shot to help people leave the area, Jacobi said.
The gunman remains at large.
Video footage from the scene showed a figure, dressed in black, on a roof around 150 yards from where Kirk was speaking.
A “college-aged” gunman fired a single shot from a high-powered, bolt-action rifle, according to law enforcement officials Thursday. Kirk was struck in the neck and began to bleed profusely before falling backward.
The gunman then jumped from the roof, police said. A screwdriver was reportedly recovered from the scene, suggesting the rifle could have been disassembled and concealed when the suspect arrived on campus.
Kirk was rushed from the scene by his security detail to a nearby hospital shortly after 12:20 p.m. President Donald Trump announced his death roughly two hours later.
Students fled a chaotic scene, which sounded “like an earthquake, and everyone starts screaming,” student Angeline Paul told Utah’s Fox 13. She was in a classroom next to the courtyard where Kirk was speaking when a group from the crowd rushed in, “falling on the ground.”
“And they’re like, ‘There’s a shooter! There’s a shooter!’” she said.
The group followed active-shooter precautions by turning off the lights and locking the door, “kind of going down the list of things we need to do,” she said.
Kirk’s killing — marking the 46th school shooting in 2025 — also follows a streak of political violence this year, including the killings of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and an attempt to set the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro ablaze.
The gunman who fired at Trump, during a campaign event in Pennsylvania last July, was similarly positioned on a rooftop roughly 150 yards from the stage where he was speaking. The attempted assassination triggered an avalanche of scrutiny on security failures that resulted in the resignation of the Secret Service director and a congressional investigation.
Kirk, 31, has appeared at dozens of similar outdoor events on college campuses across the country without incident since co-founding his conservative organization, Turning Point USA, when he was a teenager.
He was scheduled to speak at more than a dozen events as part of Turning Point’s “American Comeback” tour, scheduled through October.
While there are similarities between the assassination attempt against Trump and the killing of Kirk, “the level of security at a Charlie Kirk event versus a level of security at a political candidates’ event are night and day,” Schweit told The Independent.
“This is the type of event that Charlie Kirk held on a regular basis,” she said.
