A man was charged with the attempted assassination of US President Donald Trump after allegedly opening fire at the annual correspondents' dinner.

The plain fact is that we have mistaken the clamour of political disagreement for the legitimate expression of a civilised people. The ingenuity spent denying this fact - by debating the precise trajectory of a bullet or the hidden depths of a suspect’s psyche - is itself evidence of its force. We find ourselves in an age where the theatre of public discourse has been breached by the theatre of actual violence, and we are more concerned with the security of the actors than with the collapse of the stage.

To look upon the reports of an attempted assassination at a gathering of the press is to witness a profound breakdown in the social contract, yet the discourse surrounding it remains trapped in a most hollow abstraction. We hear much of “political violence” and “security protocols,” terms which serve only to distance the observer from the terrifying immediacy of the event. These are the languages of the bureaucrat and the strategist, designed to sanitise a reality that is, in truth, quite raw and quite bloody. They treat the event as a failure of a system, rather than a failure of the human heart.

When we apply the weight of moral scrutiny to this incident, we must ask not what the motive of the gunman might have been - for motives are often the most deceptive of all human possessions - but what this event demands of the ordinary citizen. It demands a state of perpetual vigilance that is incompatible with the life of a free and trusting people. It asks that the journalist, the politician, and the bystander all adopt a posture of suspicion, turning every public assembly into a fortress and every stranger into a potential threat. The cost of this “security” is the slow erosion of the very public life it seeks to protect.

There is a particular species of self-deception at work in the aftermath of such tragedies. The proponents of heightened security and more stringent surveillance will present their proposals as a necessary shield for democracy. They will speak of “protecting the institution” and “ensuring the safety of the presidency.” This is the self-flattering account of the administrator: the belief that one can legislate away the volatility of human passion through the application of more steel and more oversight. They propose solutions that cost them nothing - they do not ask the journalist to work in a bunker, nor do they ask the citizen to live under the constant shadow of a police state - they merely ask for the expansion of the apparatus. They propose to cure the fever by freezing the patient.

We must look past the contested details of the shooting - the identity of the man, the exact moment the trigger was pulled, the specific target of the aim - and look instead at the concrete reality of the consequence. The consequence is not merely a breach of a perimeter; it is a breach of the peace of mind that is the prerequisite for all meaningful commerce and conversation. When a man cannot attend a dinner without the shadow of an assassin, the dinner has ceased to be a social event and has become a tactical maneuver.

The history of human nature provides us with a long and grim record of such escalations. We have seen, in many a century and many a nation, that when the language of politics becomes a language of enmity, the weapons of war inevitably follow. The tragedy is not merely that a shot was fired, but that the shot was the logical conclusion of a discourse that had already abandoned the possibility of persuasion. We are witnessing the moment where the metaphor of “combat” in politics has found its literal, and most terrible, expression.

Let us hear no more of the debates regarding the suspect’s political affiliations or the technicalities of the ballistic evidence. These are the distractions of the curious. The true matter is the weight of the atmosphere we have created. We have built a world where the cost of a single moment of madness is the permanent loss of our collective security. The man who proposes more surveillance to fix this does not understand that the wound is not in the perimeter, but in the spirit of the people. We cannot secure a society by making it a prison, and we cannot find peace by merely perfecting the art of the barricade.