Some moments in our life we recognize immediately as capital-H Historic. They are seared into our memories and the history books. Mine include the Space Shuttle Challenger, Barack Obama, 9/11, and COVID-19.

What we witnessed on Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania was certainly history. Assassination attempts on current or former presidents are, regrettably, much more common than we might expect—or like—in a democracy, and former president Donald Trump is now part of a sad American legacy of political violence; one perpetrated exclusively with guns.

Somehow, a man with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle managed to avoid Secret Service and local police, climb a roof, and shoot at the former president during an outdoor rally, grazing him in the ear, killing at least one attendee, and critically injuring two more. Mere fractions of an inch and this moment in time would be tragically Historic.

It may yet prove historic. One of Trump’s indisputable skills is that he instinctively intuits a media moment. Those instincts resulted in a photo for the ages. Getting shot at, clipped, and then rising, bloodied, fist raised in defiance, yelling “Fight!” to his audience… those optics may well solidify his supporters and propel him to the White House. Were that to happen, the history books would certainly point to this moment. A Hollywood screenwriter could scarcely script it better.

Which is not to say Trump is assured of—or somehow now deserves—another term. Nor does it mean that his opponents should stop calling out his dangerous rhetoric. Quite the opposite. It’s imperative they now work doubly hard to defeat him.

This abhorrent act is a reminder that political violence is never acceptable, no matter the target, and that violent rhetoric has real-world repercussions. Yet we must not mistake from where that rhetoric really comes.

Just minutes after the shooting, J.D. Vance wrote on X/Twitter:

Today is not just some isolated incident.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.

This is transparent, self-serving bullshit. Vance is a leading vice presidential contender for a candidate who calls his opponents “vermin,” agitates for immigrants to be concentrated into camps and deported, and reportedly inspired 54 cases of violence, threats, and alleged assaults in his name. It’s unsurprisingly characteristic for their party to blame the other side rather than looking inward at their standard bearer.

President Biden’s call to “lower the temperature” is welcome and necessary, as long as we remember which side generates most of the heat.

It’s right for President Biden to call the attack “sick,” and state unequivocally that “there’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” even as the other side uses violent imagery.

It’s appropriate to call for “unity”, as long as we’re not meeting fascists “halfway” closer to fascism.

Meanwhile, let’s not ignore the nature of the assault itself. It is practically Shakespearean that the would-be assassin’s weapon of choice was an AR-15, which the NRA once called “America’s Rifle” and which the GOP fetishizes. This is a party whose members wear AR-15 rifle pins, pose with assault-style rifles for their Christmas cards, oppose gun-free zones (unless they’re in those zones), and have no intention of addressing gun violence.

Beyond “unity” and “lowered temperatures,” what we should be calling for are laws restricting access to AR-15 and similar assault-style weapons (and bump stocks, recently deemed legal again by the far-right Supreme Court majority).

I want Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to immediately offer bills in the House and Senate today. Call it, I dunno, the “Tough Republicans Uniting for Maximum Protection Act” and dare Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the GOP to block it.

Taking the attempted assassination of a former president with an AR-15, and banning those weapons?

That would make this moment absolutely Historic, in the best possible way.