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It was part of a new, grim tradition in a polarized country — trying to pin immediate responsibility for an act of public violence on one of two political sides. Experts warn that the rush to blame sometimes ambiguous and irrational acts on political movements could lead to more conflict.

"What you're seeing now is exactly how the spiral of violence occurs," said Robert Pape, a political scientist and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago.

On Friday, authorities announced they arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson of Washington, Utah, in the shooting. While a registered voter, he was not affiliated with any party and had not voted in the last two general elections. Even so, officials said Robinson recently grew more political and expressed negative views about Kirk.

There was other initial evidence of Robinson's potential influences. According to court papers, he carved taunting phrases into his ammunition — including one bullet casing marked with "Hey, fascist! Catch!" — and others from the irony-laden world of memes and online video games.

Experts say political assassins don't always fall into neatly sorted partisan categories. In some cases, like Thomas Mathew Crooks, who shot Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally last year, there is little record of any political stances whatsoever. The FBI said Crooks also researched then-President Joe Biden as a possible attack target.

Bruce Hoffman, who studies terrorism at Georgetown University, noted the FBI created a new category, Nihilistic Violent Extremism, to track the increasing number of attacks that seem to have no clear political motivation.

"Extremism is becoming a salad bowl of ideologies where you can pick whatever you want," Hoffman said, adding the increasing number of lone wolf attacks means violence is increasingly unmoored from organizations with clear political goals.

What's more important than the attackers' state of mind, experts stress, is the broader political environment. The more heated the atmosphere, the more likely it'll lead unstable people to commit violence.

"What they all share is a political ecosystem that's very permissive about violence towards political rivals," Arie Perlinger, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, said of recent perpetrators of political violence. "Because politicians are incentivized to use extreme rhetoric and extreme language, that leads to demonization of political rivals."

Pete Buttigieg, a former Democratic presidential candidate who engages frequently with the right on Fox News and other forums, sees social media as a fever swamp driving the demonization and danger.

"Many people around America, normal people, not dangerous people, were at a moment when we all should have still been praying for the victim and his family," he said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." Instead they were "busy online praying for some shred of evidence that the shooter would turn out to be from the other political team. That is not healthy."

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Kirk, 31, was an icon on the new, populist right, especially among young conservatives, and a key ally of Trump. While some conservatives called for calm, others, such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, called for "war."

In a speech on the House floor on Thursday, Rep. Mary Miller, an Illinois Republican, said Kirk's death "is part of a disturbing trend in political violence in our country, encouraged by the radical left and amplified by a corrupt media that has gone from being fake to totally evil."

Many prominent Democrats issued statements urging calm on both sides. Among them were California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose husband was gravely injured by a hammer-wielding attacker who broke into their house in 2022 in an assault that Trump, among other Republicans, mocked.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, also called for lowering the temperature across the board.

Friday, shortly after announcing the suspect's arrest, Trump said, "the radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime.Ìý… The radicals on the left are the problem."

The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the U.S. were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being shot and killed by police.

Hoffman said in modern history, the right was responsible for more political attacks on people than the left. He said that's because left-wing radicals are more likely to target property rather than people, and because the extreme right boasts organizations such as militias.

He added that after Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted of crimes during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to overturn his election loss, "there's a belief in certain quarters that, if you engage in violence, the slate can be wiped clean."

Still, there's also been political violence from the left. In 2017, a 66-year-old man who supported leftist causes opened fire at a congressional Republican baseball practice, critically wounding Rep. Steve Scalise, who eventually recovered.

In 2022, an armed man angry over a leaked ruling that would limit abortion rights tried to enter the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The man backed off when he saw U.S. Marshals guarding the justice's house and was persuaded to call 911 and surrender to police.

Pape said those who engage in political violence are often not the same as the partisans who stoke debates online. He said about 40% of those who perpetrate political violence have a mental illness.

He said he worried about Trump's one-sided condemnation of left-wing violence, saying it will only inflame the conflict. He compared it to when some liberals condemn all Trump voters as racists.

"The constituents of whoever is doing this, it emboldens them," Pape said. As for the group being tarnished as uniquely violent, "it creates a bigger sense of defiance," he added. "What we need to do is convince Trump to do more restraining of his side because we're really in a tinderbox moment."

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