The country didn’t need this. The past year had already been one of the most miserable, tumultuous election seasons in modern memory before yesterday’s assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, which left one rally-goer dead, two others wounded, and the candidate himself bleeding from his ear. The US political climate has felt dangerously overheated for a very long time. It feels a few degrees closer to meltdown now.

Like the past twenty-four hours, the days and likely weeks to follow will swirl with wild speculation, conspiracy, and lies. Be very careful. We know little about the perpetrator, twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, and what we do know does not lend itself to the easy conclusions demanded by irresponsible voices in this moment. The shooter made one political donation in his young life, $15 to a pro-Democratic PAC on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, before registering as a Republican eight months later. He was reportedly wearing the T-shirt of a popular gun enthusiast YouTube channel. The FBI says it has not established a motive.

But there’s one thing we can say for sure: political violence is wrong and does not lead to anything good. It is morally wrong to kill people, period, whether someone is your political opponent, a feuding neighbor who finally pushed you too far, a stranger in a hoodie who makes you feel unsafe, or anyone who has somehow wronged you along the way in life. Had the shooter’s bullet not missed the former president by an inch, it would not have been a successful assassination; there is no such thing. To resort to murder as a solution, in politics or anywhere else, is to declare defeat: the defeat of reason, of one’s humanity, of functional society, of politics itself.