Looking back through my posts since January 6, 2021, I see that I have not really posted much at all about the violent attempt to overthrow our government since that day.
It's not because I haven't watched my share of videos; believe me, I have — enough to know how close it came, even without the stories that continue to come out about gassing members of Congress in the tunnels using inside information about their whereabouts.
I'm prompted to write today because of a quote I heard yesterday while listening to the NPR show It's Been a Minute. The host, Sam Sanders, was interviewing NPR national security correspondent Hannah Allam, who was up close and personal at the Capitol on January 6. The whole interview is interesting, of course, but the concluding question and answer are the reason I am writing this.
What part of your experience that day at the Capitol during the siege will stick with you the most?
I guess it's the moment when we saw these guys fighting over the breaking of a window. And one guy wanted to break the window and get inside. And this other guy, Joe from Ohio, was telling him, "No, this is the People's House, don't destroy property!" And he was so mad. And he came over, and he saw my mic, and so he came up to me and he was complaining about this, you know, "We didn't come to do this, we didn't come to destroy property!"
So I asked him, "Well," looking around at all of this chaos going on, "what do you want to come out of all this?" And he, you know, without missing a beat, said he wanted to see gallows set up on the lawn and to bring lawmakers out and see them hanging four by four by four for treason. Those were his exact words.
And so to me it was chilling—this man who would sit there and be upset over the breaking of a window—was, in the next breath, fine with a mass execution of sitting lawmakers.
And then Allam compared it to seeing leaders speaking to crowds in southern Lebanon or Iraq.
This morning, I read a New York Times story reprinted in the Pioneer Press about the moments when rioter Ashli Babbitt was shot trying to climb through a window outside the Speaker's Lobby.
I've watched multiple videos of that event from different angles, including a long one recorded by a riot participant who was moving through the building for 20–30 minutes beforehand. (This particular videographer was one of the voices you hear trying to convince the Capitol police at the doorway to leave their posts "so they wouldn't be hurt" and that it was inevitable that the rioters would get through so they might as well leave.)
It's very clear watching the video of the rioters at those doors that they would have gone through them if Babbitt had not been shot (or if something else equally dire hadn't happened). And as we know now, members of Congress, including Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who is quoted in the Times story, were still in the hallway and could see the writhing mass of rioters through the doors.
"I could look them in the eyes," McGovern is quoted as saying. He described the rioters this way: "...these people seemed crazed. And I mean, they weren't here to make a political point. They were here to destroy things." The videos I've seen clearly show that to be the case.
The Capitol cop on the Speaker's Lobby side of the door, a lieutenant who has not been identified but is on desk leave after the shooting, could not see the three uniformed cops on the rioters' side of the door. He had no way of knowing if the rioters were armed or not, of course (and we still don't know that currently).
If you've watched any of the videos, you know that the three cops at the door suddenly left and at that moment the rioters moved up to the doors and started trying to break them with new fervor. Some of the rioters then saw the lieutenant on the other side, who had extended his arms, gun in hand. They called out, "He's got a gun!" and "There's a gun!"
Most of the rioters fell back, but not Ashli Babbitt. In the melee, she was boosted toward a newly broken window and the lieutenant shot her. She fell back, and another set of cops who had been coming up from behind to take control of scene took over, rendering aid to Babbitt and pushing the crowd back.
The rioters appeared stunned by the shooting and mostly gave up at this point, thank goodness, rather than finding new energy from Babbitt's "martyrdom" in that immediate moment to rush the doors, possibly to their own deaths, or the deaths of the cops, or both.
Or to the hanging of lawmakers, four by four by four, on the gallows that really had been set up out on the lawn.
If that lieutenant had had less-lethal rounds in his gun, things might be different, but given the circumstances, I think this was one of the better outcomes possible in this terrible situation. If he hadn't shot in some way, the rioters would have broken the doors. Maybe those cops who came from behind would have made a difference, but the lieutenant didn't know they were coming, and what would their choices have been? To shoot even more people as they were breaking through into the hallway.
One rioter died instead of many.
So it's ridiculous for Ashli Babbitt's husband to say, as he is quoted in the Times, "I don't know why she had to die in the People's House. She was voicing her opinion and she got killed for it."
He asserts that she had no weapons on her, and that is true, but she was doing a lot more than voicing her opinion, and given her behavior, whether she had a weapon or not is immaterial—she was part of a mob clearly intent on violence, with or without weapons.
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