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.

Political violence rarely solves any problem it purports to be concerned with. What it inevitably does is create a fearful climate of rage and recrimination that lends itself to crackdowns on dissent, and one that is easy prey for opportunists. Purveyors of political violence have often thought themselves crusaders furthering a righteous cause; more often than not, they only brought disaster on themselves and what they claimed to stand for. At worst, they have triggered cycles of violence that have seen hundreds, thousands, even millions of people pointlessly lose their lives.

There is no one, simple explanation for what took place on Saturday afternoon. But it is not “politicizing” a tragedy to question the logic and sense of gun laws, as Pennsylvania has, that demand that you are twenty-one years old before you can buy a handgun but freely let you buy the kind of semiautomatic rifle the shooter used when you are just eighteen. It is not “politicizing” to ask why the United States alone among wealthy, developed countries has the scale and frequency of gun violence it has, and whether it might have something to do with the easy availability of firearms saturating the country.

And it is not “politicizing” to point out that violence has for far too long been the go-to solution for US political institutions — that violence and its justification suffuse the actions and words of even the most mainstream political voices we think of as sensible, reasonable, clear-thinking.

As you read this, the United States is embroiled in two exceptionally bloody wars in two separate continents, one of which has been widely deemed a genocide. The sitting president who, by his own description, is running those “wars around the world” was just widely praised in the media as a “master” of foreign policy, just as Trump himself was roundly praised by his own political opponents for sending cruise missiles sailing into some far-off country, officially declared presidential by an otherwise disdainful CNN for doing so. Political assassination is official US policy, whether it’s Barack Obama drone striking a US citizen accused of terrorism and his teenage son, or Donald Trump bombing the top military official of a foreign country.

How, then, can we be shocked that some disturbed young mind turned to political violence? The US public is told again and again that violence is the appropriate, just — often only — solution to the world’s ills, that it is the mark of strength, maturity, seriousness. The United States has been openly and actively at war for more than two decades now. At only twenty years old, Crooks is one of a generation that has known only war for the entire time it has spent on Earth.

What happened yesterday should spur some urgent reflection. Many are pointing to the words of the anti-Trump side and the role they may have played in bringing us to this point, including widespread jokes in the wake of this month’s Supreme Court decision that Biden should drone strike his election opponent, or the president himself saying nothing as his supporters rained boos on journalists in response to his complaints about press coverage. Those voices should think hard about trivially throwing around this kind of talk; that it sometimes might be in jest doesn’t make it any less unacceptable.

And as they process this incident, former president Trump’s supporters should likewise think long and hard about the increasingly violent rhetoric that’s come from their side of the political divide. North Carolina’s Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor just declared to a crowd that “some folks need killing.” The head of the Republican-backing Heritage Foundation recently went on TV to announce his side was carrying out “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.” Several other Trump-supporting GOP politicians have histories of calling for the execution of their opponents.

This goes all the way up to Trump himself, who has at various times mocked the attempted murder of a top Democrat’s husband, called for violence against protesters at his rallies, repeatedly threatened to prosecute his political opponents, and told supporters there is “nothing you can do” once a Democratic president picks the Supreme Court justices, “although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.”

It’s easy to call out the other side. But in a political climate like this, the former president’s supporters should realize it means nothing if they won’t do the same to their own.

Yesterday’s assassination attempt should be a wake-up call — for hardcore partisans, for their political leadership, for the public as a whole. It’s a foreboding sign for so much more than just the state of US political discourse, but for how prevalent and easily accessible the instruments of war are in American society, for how ingrained violence is as a political solution, the urgent threats both pose, and the fact that those threats do not discriminate by party or ideology.