In a country where gun violence has become the norm, Thursday's attack on a local news center in Maryland is the most recent proof of what happens in the United States when there is a disagreement.

As reported by employees in real time, the attacker, later identified as Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, entered the building with a shotgun and smoke bombs, killing five employees and wounding two others.

"This was a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette," said William Krampf, acting chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department. "This person was prepared to shoot people. His intent was to cause harm."

Ramos reportedly filed a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper in July 2012, claiming "his reputation had been damaged after the newspaper published a story the prior year about Ramos' guilty plea in a harassment case," the New York Times explained.

After losing the trial for not having sustainable arguments, Ramos contained his anger for six years until his frightening outburst.

At a crucial moment in the country's history, the physical attack on a newspaper is a tacit example of the level of intolerance in the United States.

However, the Gazette employees had the perfect answer for this: "put out the damn paper," as Chase Cook, one of the journalists, said via Twitter, writing from a mall in front of the newspaper’s building where several of his colleagues had lost their lives, and from where he continued working on the print edition for Friday.

The next day, The Capital’s front page read "5 dead in The Capital", with the photograph of Gerald Fischman (61), Rob Hiaasen (59), John McNamara (56), Rebecca Smith (34) and Wendi Winters (65), employees who will never edit, write or communicate again, but whose last notes were printed the day after their death.

President Trump, who has sustained his campaign and government by openly criticizing and attacking the media, wrote on Twitter that he was aware of what happened, sent condolences to the victims and their families, and his spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders added that "a violent attack on innocent journalists doing their job is an attack on every American."

But under a government that fails to condemn racist attacks, supports organizations like the National Rifle Association, and maintains a rampant campaign against the media, the United States has been under attack for some time now.