For years, Charlie Kirk’s appearances at college campuses were major events — drawing thousands of students and attracting protesters, often staged to maximize his interaction with the crowds of young conservatives he inspired.

And each event came with unique security risks, which campuses around the country handled case by case, according to interviews with Kirk’s former security chief and organizers at several colleges who spoke to NBC News.

Kirk’s assassination Wednesday is raising questions about whether more should have been done at Utah Valley University, in Orem, where roughly 3,000 people came to hear the conservative activist speak.

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Video taken moments after Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at an event in Utah appears to show a figure running across a rooftop opposite to where the conservative activist was sitting.

Charlie Kirk was killed on the first day of a speaking tour across university campuses, dubbed The American Comeback. At least one of the colleges on the tour, Virginia Tech, says it has not yet canceled the event in light of Wednesday’s shooting.

College spokesperson Mark Owczarski told NBC News last night that the scheduled Turning Point event there on Sept. 24 could still take place.

“The university’s focus has been directed on caring for those students who have been affected or impacted by those events. When the time is right, we’ll work with students to help them figure out what they may wish to do next. Their immediate needs come first, the logistics of a future event will follow,” he said in a statement.

Kirk planned to host a “prove me wrong table” format event at Virginia Tech where he would take questions from the crowd, just as he did in Utah on Wednesday when he was fatally shot.

The other colleges scheduled to host events on the tour have not yet responded to requests for comment.

Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance accompanied Charlie Kirk’s family to Phoenix, Arizona, with Kirk’s casket aboard Air Force Two. Kirk’s casket was transported to a mortuary.

Vance was a close friend of Kirk’s and credits him with playing a key role in his own political career and the electoral success of President Donald Trump.

Graphic videos of Kirk’s assassination continued to spread across social media platforms today, with many companies choosing to put the footage behind content warnings rather than taking it down entirely.

On YouTube and Meta, videos that showed the moment Kirk was hit by the bullet required users to acknowledge that they were willing to see sensitive content.

On other platforms, including X and TikTok, many of the videos remained easily accessible without any warning.

The spread of videos depicting violent incidents, like shootings, has been a perennial issue for social media platforms, complicated in recent years by a shift away from aggressive, human-based moderation. Most companies still have policies either banning or limiting the spread of gory videos.

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Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, President Donald Trump may be uniquely positioned to tamp down the anger that suffuses American politics and lead a movement to bind up a bitterly divided country if he chooses.

But, political strategists and officials from both parties told NBC News, that’s not the path Trump appears to be taking.

Trump has been both a target of assassination attempts and a fount of vitriolic rhetoric. He knows firsthand the passions that drive American voters and, were he to renounce partisan attacks and call on others in both parties to do the same, that gesture could potentially send a healing message.

With the killer still at large and a manhunt underway, Trump, in his video response, laid blame on familiar foils. In a message from the Oval Office Wednesday, he singled out the “radical left” and made no mention of cases in which Democratic elected officials in Minnesota and Pennsylvania were targets of violent attacks.

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