After every shooting, blame and rationalizations fly. I know, because I was shot in the head at a 2011 congressional event near my home in Tucson, Ariz. Eighteen other people were shot at that event, six of whom died. In the weeks that followed, there were all kinds of arguments as to why and how that could have happened. To me, only one rang true: Someone dangerous had access to a gun.

There have now been two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump in just over two months. Two separate shooters, in possession of semiautomatic weapons, came terrifyingly close to inflicting great harm. But the through line here isn’t former President Trump. The through line isn’t the Secret Service. The through line isn’t heated rhetoric. The through line is, as it always is, the guns.

We are a country weary of repetitive gun violence. When that happens, you have a school shooting on a Wednesday and the country’s attention has moved on by Friday. You have a country where shootings on interstate highways appear to be a pattern and students in Kentucky miss several days of school during a manhunt for the perpetrator of the most recent interstate shooting. I imagine many people reading this right now might not even know about that shooting, or that manhunt, or those kids in Kentucky, doing schoolwork at home because it’s not safe to go to school.

Political rhetoric matters — but rhetoric wasn’t in the bushes around Mr. Trump’s golf course, or on the interstate in Kentucky, or in the school hallways in Georgia, or at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa. Dangerous people with guns were. The most recent would-be attack on the former president, on Sunday, is an indicator of where we are as a nation: a place where no one is safe from gun violence.

There’s no doubt that our political debate needs to cool down. We live in a participatory democracy with a wide range of opinions. We always have times when emotions are running hot; it’s inevitable.

What’s not inevitable is angry or inexplicably violent people having such easy access to guns. In Pennsylvania, a gunman too young to buy a beer nonetheless got his hands on a semiautomatic rifle. In Georgia, the high school shooting suspect was 14, and used an AR-15-style rifle. In Kentucky, the suspected gunman reportedly sent a text message declaring his intention to “kill a lot of people” and then opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. Nothing about these episodes was inevitable.