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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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The report from the university was that he was shot from a building 200 yards away, but I was able to locate the exact spot he was at on google maps and I can't find a building with a line of sight to him that is that far away. Judging by the videos I have seen he was roughly here. Never mind, I got my pavilions mixed up and he was in a different spot in that same courtyard area.

I am quite familiar with UVU. A few pieces of context: UVU has been growing like a weed the last decade especially. It was a vocational/community college for a while and semi-recently became a more full fledged university. There’s still a lot of non-traditional and part time students still, partly by design. They also benefitted from demographics and location - the only other big college is BYU in the area and the general area (not just Provo-Orem metropolitan area but also surrounding sprawl like Lehi’s “Silicon Slopes”) is pretty dense and otherwise you need to go up to Salt Lake City for the U. This means lots of new buildings and lots of new administrators and such. It’s Utah so it’s red, but not overwhelmingly so as you might expect; maybe 60-40 in the district in question.

All of this to say that Utah also doesn’t have much political violence to start with, and given the layout and history of UVU, it doesn’t surprise me that tracking down the shooter will be a little challenging, and it also doesn’t surprise me that security wasn’t super duper tight. They said the older guy wasn’t the shooter - but an older guy in campus isn’t too weird to start with.

I encountered this on X. No idea of its veracity, but maybe that roof looks like one of the buildings from the map? https://x.com/chhardman/status/1965882258902102232?t=QWRPSTTaTYHNGabfh-HW2A&s=09

According to NBC News (link is to live coverage, so will probably break eventually...) he was shot from the Losee Center, which appears to be part of the Browning Administration Building to the south of that location (and only 200 feet away?):

A spokesperson for Utah Valley University said in a statement that Kirk was shot from the university's Losee Center, roughly 200 feet away from where he was sitting.

I realized I had him in the wrong part of the courtyard. I have seen some reports about a potential shooter in/on that building and it would be about 350-400 feet from where he was actually located.