Folks, we ought to be better than this. Someone has sent pipe bombs (or perhaps something resembling pipe bombs) by mail or courier) to Presidents Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder, financier George Soros, and former CIA Director John Brennan, care of CNN. The Soros package was found in his mailbox Monday. The other packages were found yesterday.

The Secret Service intercepted the Obama and Clinton packages before they got anywhere near their houses. The Brennan package resulted in the on-air evacuation of CNN’s New York headquarters, requiring transfer of operations to the Washington bureau. The Holder package had the wrong address, but like the others, listed Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s district office as the return address; the package was found there when the Post Office sent it “back.”

who sent the packages?

Naturally, theories abound. Given the fact that all the targets are Democrats who vocally oppose President Donald Trump, Occam’s Razor would suggest the perpetrator is a Trump supporter taking the president’s more heated rhetoric literally. One cannot dismiss the possibility, however, that this is a hoax campaign designed to discredit Trump and the Republicans mere weeks before crucial midterm elections.

That last piece isn’t a particularly popular thing to say. Commentators were tripping over each other to discredit such ideas, and the people who espouse them. But the simple fact remains that no one except the guilty party knows who sent these packages or why.

Our unfortunate legacy of mob violence

In a way, this is nothing new. Political violence was, for a very long stretch of American history, fairly regular. The Sons of Liberty, for all we venerate them today, were at their core an unruly mob. In reaction to the imposition of the Stamp Act, a Boston mob ransacked the home and office of Andrew Oliver, the stamp agent for Massachusetts, on August 13, 1765. Thirteen days later, another mob destroyed the home of Oliver’s brother-in-law, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson.

Mob violence led to the outbreak of the American Revolution, and later to Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Bleeding Kansas, the near fatal caning of Sen. Charles Sumner, John Brown’s Raid at Harper’s Ferry, and eventually, the Civil War. After we killed each other by the hundreds of thousands in the civil War (when 620,000 in blue and gray died), we seemed to have backed away from settling our differences with violence.

Even so, the violence didn’t end completely. The Ku Klux Klan. The Weather Underground. The Black Panthers. Harvey Milk and George Moscone. William McKinley. John F. Kennedy. But the Klan, Panthers, and Weathermen were comparatively small groups with outsized impacts. Milk, Moscone, McKinley, and Kennedy were all killed by lone actors.

We don’t tolerate political violence abroad; we shouldn’t tolerate it here

The bombs this week are also likely the work of a lone crazy, whichever side they prove to support. But social media is whipping people into a frenzy. The distance and anonymity the Internet provides encourages people to surrender to their worst instincts, saying things they ordinarily might not say to someone in person.

All of this reminds me of the way people settle differences in places where American servicemen have deployed to protect civilians or keep warring factions apart: places like Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. If we won’t tolerate Afghans killing each other because they can’t agree on a president, then we ought not tolerate it here in the greatest nation on Earth.

It’s okay to get furious with politicians. It’s even okay to get furious with that random person online who won’t be reasonable and see things your way. It’s not okay to take matters into your own hands, except at the ballot box.

The fact that I felt like I had to write that sentence saddens me. Let’s do better folks.

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Tom McCuin is a strategic communication consultant and retired Army Reserve Civil Affairs and Public Affairs officer whose career includes serving with the Malaysian Battle Group in Bosnia, two tours in Afghanistan, and three years in the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs in the Pentagon. When he’s not devouring political news, he enjoys sailboat racing and umpiring Little League games (except the ones his son plays in) in Alexandria, Va. Follow him on Twitter at @tommccuin