An incident involving the national pastime, a baseball game practice, has delivered us a reprieve from the partisan battles that have roiled Capitol Hill.

For the immediate future, Republicans and Democrats are speaking as members of a single political party.

Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise is injured from a gunshot wound inflicted by a shooter who opened fire on the GOP baseball practicing for a charity game scheduled for the weekend against the Democratic team; he is one of five victims wounded in this senseless act.

I don’t know about you, but I find it utterly incomprehensible that an act like this could occur in such a setting. Then again, this is 21st-century America in a time of terrible political division and rancor.

We don’t know whether politics motivated the shooter. Authorities haven’t yet established any kind of motive to what this individual did.

There is no little news to be gleaned from this event. One positive element is that Rep. Scalise and the other victims are going to make a full recovery from their wounds.

The other could be that it likely has spared us, if only for a limited time, from the angry political rhetoric that has produced such a toxic atmosphere in our nation’s capital.