Some years ago, trying to understand what it might take to break America’s fever of political violence, I asked a former Justice Department official what she thought about the possibility of a second civil war in the United States.

Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who has spent much of her career thinking about how to combat extremism, was worried about worsening political violence. (I favor a simple definition of political violence: actions intended to provoke or prevent change.) And like many of the people I have interviewed about political violence over the years—including top military officials, members of Congress, local and federal law enforcement, political scientists, terrorism experts, peace negotiators, and others—she told me that cycles of horrific political violence can perpetuate themselves for a generation or more after they have taken hold. Once a certain threshold is crossed, political violence tends to get worse before it gets better, in many cases cataclysmically so.

But McCord also said something in passing that I’ve thought about repeatedly since, including yesterday after Charlie Kirk’s assasination. Wouldn’t most Americans, if faced with the prospect of killing their neighbors and destroying the country from within, probably still choose peace? She told me that she wished people would stop and think: “Do you really want us to be in a bloody civil war for 10 or 15 years? You’re going to see your grandkids get killed. Do you really want that?”