Early the morning of Wednesday, June 14, a man with a gun set his sights on a man playing baseball.

The ensuing shootout, which was over within minutes, ended with several injuries. Most managed to take refuge in the dugout; the man on second base wasn’t so lucky. He was hit in the pelvis by a round fired from a 7.62 mm semi-automatic rifle. It splintered bones and pulverized his internal organs. That he is still alive is a credit to chance, quick police response and crack medical attention.

Bloody as it was, the shooting was — by American standards — banal. It was the 154th mass shooting in the United States since the beginning of the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The weapon used was readily available, cheap and purchased legally, according to the FBI.

There had been another mass shooting less than 24 hours earlier in La Madera, New Mexico, in which five people died. Two died in a mass shooting in St. Louis hardly 48 hours later.

But because the victim was United States Congressman Steve Scalise, the ravages of physics gave way to the reality of modern politics practically before the blood had congealed on that field in Washington, D.C. As with previous mass shootings in the U.S. and elsewhere — Dallas Police, Pulse Night Club, even Quebec City — the facts are less important than the person or group who can assign blame as quickly and loudly as possible.

For the left, Scalise became the still-bleeding embodiment of his conservative, pro-gun politics. “He did come to the leadership after some controversy over attending a White nationalist event, which he says he didn’t know what it was. Because he is in jeopardy and everyone is pulling for him, are we required in a moral sense to put that aside?” MSNBC host Joy Reid asked.

Evidently, the answer was a resounding ‘No’ as Reid proceeded to lambaste Scalise for his conservative voting record. She noted, with what might be described as scornful glee, that one of the responding officers was a black lesbian — as though the karmic gods, and not a murderous gunman, had shot Scalise in the pelvis.

The shooting of Scalise proved once again how the Twitter-addled hyper-partisans on both the left and right thoroughly deserve one another. The shooting of Scalise proved once again how the Twitter-addled hyper-partisans on both the left and right thoroughly deserve one another.

The Twittersphere reverberated with like-minded sentiment, with varying degrees of eloquence. “I don’t care if James T. Hodgkinson is a ‘Bernie Bro’ or a supporter of Trump. He’s a white man and media privileged white men — even criminals,” tweeted journalist Terrell Starr, less than an hour after the shooting ended.

What’s the appropriate point in time to start politicizing the shooting of a politician? Who knows? It’s safe to assume that it’s likely after he or she is out of their coma. But even that’s too long for today’s rage-filled, impatient partisans of either stripe. The likes of Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, who each count millions of followers, piled on within hours of the shooting. Scalise had hardly been hustled off the field when Jones somehow managed to blame the attack on gun control, and called for members of Congress to arm themselves.

Few, though, were as pithy as writer Gavin McInnes. “Liberal rhetoric dehumanizes us so crazy people feel justified killing us. This is not an accident,” he wrote just as Scalise was undergoing the first of many surgeries. Within hours he’d columnized on the subject. “They don’t want to challenge our ideas,” he wrote of liberals. “They want to end our lives, and they are willing to do it by any means necessary.”

The shooting of Scalise proved once again how the Twitter-addled hyper-partisans on both the left and right thoroughly deserve one another. Time and again, they’ve reduced such tragedies to a series of gotcha moments and comfortable narratives, to be consumed by the like-minded and demonized by the enemy. In doing so, social media warriors trivialize tragedy and reduce political discourse to the level of circus sideshows and professional wrestling.

In a way, you can hardly blame them. There were 477 mass shootings in the United States in 2016, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker database, accounting for 606 deaths and 1,781 injuries. At some point (was it Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, or any one of the hundreds in between?) such incidents went from aberrant to inevitable.

The televised spectacle of blood in the streets, the ensuing displays of grief — they’ve become familiar enough to be numbing.

Maybe this is the only way left for Americans to find fresh meaning in something so commonplace as a man firing a gun into a crowd.

Maybe politicizing the shooting of a man as he played baseball is exactly the kind of sideshow America deserves.

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