Disagree, what is happening is entirely different, as I'm sure you well know.

It's not entirely different - and while there are some significant differences, they're not in the ways that matter to this point. That Kirk was killed by a private citizen, rather than a government official, is not relevant to the impact that their violent deaths have and what level of dignity those events deserve to be treated with in the public discourse. In much the same way that the black community (and a lot of progressives and others) were appalled by both the killing of George Floyd and the killing of the black jogger, even though the killers in those two cases were different - because a lot of the impacts stemmed from the killings themselves, not who did it.

It's the sentiment encapsulated in the expression, "too soon." When people are still raw from a tragedy, if you start treating that tragedy with less than the respect that they think it warrants, they will think you're being a monster. I think Kimmel (or his writers) and Attiah and Dowd really misread where that line actually is today. For the last many years, saying things in "normie" cultural spaces that violated progressive taboos as being hateful or vile could get you fired without warning, but there weren't all that many "invisible lines" that you couldn't cross in saying things that conservatives found hateful or vile. That tide has turned. Conservatives are now feeling very muscular in pushing for their unwritten rules about what statements are so offensive as to "go too far" and warrant private parties firing their employees.