Late-night TV legend Jay Leno called the assassination of conservative rockstar Charlie Kirk “the death of free speech. The Tonight Show icon also said Kirk’s cold-blooded murder “was not a random shooting.”

“I mean, it’s the death of free speech, to think that you are so illiterate and so stupid you can’t answer verbally, and you have to shoot somebody with a gun to win the argument,” Jay Leno said last week on The Tim Conway Jr. Show on KFI 640 in Los Angeles.

Leno said the days of “lively” debates between conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley and liberal cultural icons like James Baldwin “are gone.”

“But this is a political assassination of a man I didn’t necessarily agree with, but I certainly enjoyed listening to because, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ I don’t have to agree on everything,” Leno said. “We’re in a point in this country where if you don’t agree with everybody and everything, you take out a gun and you shoot them, and especially on a college campus?”

“I enjoy listening to the other side because that’s how I get smarter,” Leno said, adding that Charlie Kirk was smarter than him and wasn’t someone “who berated people” he disagreed with.

“It’s very unsettling. This one really struck me. Every time someone’s assassinated, but it’s really the death of free speech,” Leno said.

Kirk’s death has sparked vigils around the world, from South Korea to Spain, the United Kingdom and Australia.