Stop trying to score points reacting to political violence

Decorum in the United States Senate generally calls for chamber members to avoid direct personal confrontations. So it was somewhat unprecedented when Minnesota's Tina Smith sought out Utah's Mike Lee in a hallway off the Senate floor Monday evening to challenge him over two repellent social media posts Lee made after the weekend murders of a Minnesota state representative and her husband and the shootings of another Minnesota lawmaker and his wife.

The conversation was as necessary as it was unusual.

Lee, a Republican, posted about the assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman. "This is what happens," he wrote, "When Marxists don't get their way." As it turned out, Lee was mistaken in his identification. The alleged shooter is deeply conservative and religious and had a long hit list that included predominantly Democrats such as Hortman. Smith, a Democrat, called the post "devastating."

We all should agree with that.

The issue is not so much that Lee was wrong but that he so eagerly tried to identify the shooter as a political enemy and only deleted the posts after three days of intense criticism. The partisan antipathy that holds sway over our nation is literally killing us. People like Lee — and they exist on either side of the divide — only fan the flames when they further politicize the political violence that has long been a national disgrace. 

We see it all the time. A political leader is shot, a politician's home is set on fire, protesters are firebombed, government workers are attacked, and too many of us wait nervously to learn the identity and politics of the shooter. Knowing whether they are Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, and whom they voted for in the last election shapes our reaction to the news. Sadly, there is no shortage of people in both camps keeping tallies to be cited when the next killing occurs, as proof that this really is a problem on the other side. No, it's a problem on all sides, all the time. And people keep getting threatened and attacked, and some die.

Another troubling strand of this nightmare is the identification of judges making controversial decisions. We want to know which president appointed him or her, as if that determines whether we give the ruling credence or criticize it. Threats to members of the judiciary are now commonplace; violence seems inevitable.

We need to stop the labeling. Hopefully, that will help lower the temperature and ratchet down the violence. But it does not help when someone like Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a former college football coach, condemns the rhetoric but says toning it down is "never going to happen. I’ve been in sports all my life. Everybody is competitive. They’re always going to push back. Nobody is going to give up."

This is not a game. And nobody is winning by keeping score. If we keep going down this road, all of us will end up losers.