It’s another wet morning in Scotland. The wind howled most of the night. It’s an odd thing to go from a high desert climate where the wind can howl just as loud but blows dry and dusty to the rain pelting sort of howling that happens here on the southwest coast of Scotland.

It seems to me that the whole world is howling over one egregious wrong or another. Doesn’t it feel like the whole world is bowed over mourning? From the genocide taking place in Gaza (even the denials of such a genocide from Senator Tom Cotton makes me mourn) to Russia’s war upon the Ukraine, to the bombing of Qatar, to the attacks upon Poland, to the children still suffering the shooting deaths at Annunciation Catholic School, to the shooting at the high school in Colorado, to the assassination of Minnesota legislators Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman or divisive firebrand Charlie Kirk. On and on it goes. I still haven’t stopped mourning for those killed at Sandy Hook or the shooting at Uvalde that took place when I was first studying here at Ayr, Scotland.

I don’t know a single soul this morning who is rejoicing over the shooting death of Kirk. Not a single soul. The truth is I wish no one ever suffered death from guns or bombs or drones or wars of any sort, rhetorical or real.

The world should be in mourning. We have every reason to be putting on sackcloths and marking our foreheads with ashes. Not solely because of the death of this father of young children but for every child both Israeli and Palestinian killed or maimed. And for every Ukrainian child slaughtered or stolen by Putin’s forced labor military. And for every voice for good silenced by a bullet or bomb in this world.

But even as we mourn for each one of these wrongs, let’s pay attention to the rhetoric being employed because every war starts first with words.

Over the past 24 hours, I have heard a numerous politicians and commentators calling Kirk’s death “political violence.” It’s almost as if they were all handed a narrative tip sheet to read from.

But the facts are that whoever shot Kirk has not been apprehended. We do not know their motivation. Perhaps it is someone who had a private beef with Kirk that we have no knowledge of.

What we do know for sure is that whoever shot him was not some 17-year old buckwheat out of Idaho making guns on a 3-D printer. Nor was it some liberal grandpa showing up at county commissioner meetings arguing for better gun control. This was a sniper. Someone skilled enough to kill a man with one shot from long range.

But that’s all we know.

We don’t know if they were hired or if they did it out of hatred. And we don’t know that is political violence. We only know it was intentional violence.

And in less than 24 hours Kirk’s death has already become a tool of those seeking to divide Americans even further and that includes Trump, who took to the airwaves to immediately condemn every person in America who does not support him or his agenda, those he labeled once again as “radical leftists”.

You cannot on one hand call for unity in the country while purposely dividing Americans through your words of “either for us or against us.” (By the way, those that Trump defines as “radical leftists” are the ones of the front line calling for gun reform. They are the ones least likely to resort to political violence.)

Of course all Americans should be concerned over what this moment signals for our country. Michael Jensen, a researcher at the University of Maryland who has tracked political violence since the 1970s warns that America is “in a very, very dangerous spot right now that could quite easily escalate into more widespread civil unrest if we don’t get a hold of it. This could absolutely serve as a kind of flashpoint that inspires more of it.”

We all need to be careful not to add to the rhetoric of violence and that goes for President Trump as well. He sets the tone for the nation and in the last nine months that tone has been nothing short of combative.

Meanwhile, release the Epstein files.