A critic of this blog, a gentleman with whom I have a casual acquaintance, posited an interesting notion that I believe needs a response.
He wrote: An insurrection is an attempt to overtake a government. How are you going to overtake a government without weapons?
He refers to the riot that erupted 1/6 on Capitol Hill. I have called the riot an “insurrection.” So have others. Those on the far right have declined to use that term. That is their call. I’ll stick with my description of what happened.
My critic wonders how one can have an “overtake a government without weapons.”
Actually you can. Indeed, from what I witnessed on 1/6, the mob that stormed into the Capitol Building had plenty of “weapons,” which they used with brutal efficiency as they stormed into the halls of our federal government. Did you see ’em beat the cops with flag poles, blasting them with chemical spray, throwing fire extinguishers … that kind of thing? Oh, and what about the zip ties recovered from many of the suspects arrested on that day?
What would have occurred had they been able to storm into the rooms where members of Congress were accepting the Electoral College ballots that declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election? The terrorists, as near as I could tell, weren’t joking when they hollered “Hang Mike Pence!” while looking for the vice president of the United States, who was presiding over this governmental ritual.
Could this mob of terrorists stopped the process of certifying the result? Absolutely!
The best news of all is that they were prevented from getting their grimy mitts on more victims by quick-thinking Capitol Police officers.
My blog critic referred to the “so-called insurrection.” There was nothing “so-called” about we witnessed that day.
The U..S. House of Representatives select committee that is ramping up its probe of that horrific event vows to get to the truth. May the panel find all of it.
One more point: I checked my American Heritage Dictionary and looked up “insurrection.” It describes the word as “an act of open revolt against civil authority or a constituted government.”
Yep. That’s what we witnessed on 1/6.