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While disagreements are inevitable in American democracy, politics must never become a full-blown battleground, US President Joe Biden said on Sunday, referring to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

“We cannot allow this violence to become normalized,” Biden said in an address to the nation from the Oval Office, the president’s official workspace. “The political rhetoric in this country has become very heated. It is time to calm down. We all have a responsibility to do so.”

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in elections expected to be held later this year, was injured after being shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. One spectator was killed while two others were seriously injured in the shooting. The alleged assailant was identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who is a registered Republican. He was not at the rally and was killed by Secret Service agents.

Speaking about Sunday’s shooting, Biden said he believed politics should be a place for peaceful debate and not become “a literal battleground, God forbid, a battleground.”

The statement comes after Paul Abbate, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the US intelligence and security service, said the agency had observed increasingly violent rhetoric online since the attack on Trump, the Associated Press reported. “We all face a difficult time as we approach the election,” Biden said. “The higher the stakes, the more heated the passions. This places an additional burden on all of us to ensure that no matter how strong our beliefs are, we never descend into violence.”

Biden also noted that the Republican National Convention was set to begin Monday in Milwaukee. He said he had “no doubt” that Republicans would “criticize my record and come up with their own vision for this country.” He said he would also resume his re-election campaign. “We debate and disagree, that’s how democracy is supposed to work,” the US president said. “We compare and contrast the characters of the candidates. The backgrounds, the issues, the agenda of America. In America, we resolve our conflicts with the ballot box, not with bullets.”