Assassination has never changed the history of the world. β Benjamin Disraeli
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Hold my beer. -- Gavrilo Prinzip
More seriously, this is a textbook example of an unprovable hypothesis. You could equally argue that the assassination of a prominent person is so shocking, so extraordinary, that it either signals or causes seismic shifts in power.
And the custom of heads of state killing each other's people rather than each other indicates, to my eye, a desire to keep history rolling along in the usual profitable groove.