The riots last summer didn't involve insurrectionists violently invading the seat of power of the legislative branch with live ammunition intent on disrupting the peaceful transfer of power in a democratic republic.
72 people were arrested in DC on weapons charges during the summer riots [1]. Protestors erected a guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos’s house [2]. Rioters threw bricks through apartment windows and accosted random people on the street [3] in scenes reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.
Let’s not use the violent insurrection at the Capitol to downplay other violent episodes.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/politics/washington-dc...
[1] https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/may-2020-january-2021-unrest-relate...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-protests-guillotine-jeff-bez...
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-live...
The events of this Wednesday, a single (what I would call) medium-sized protest, got 5 people killed including one policeman, right? So just in terms of the ratio of deaths to participator-days, I think this Wednesday's event probably has last year's protests beaten by at least two orders of magnitude in the loss of life department. Even if you take away the two people who didn't die from the use of a weapon or a savage beating, I think they still got the high score by far.
To be sure, mob violence should be condemned wherever it appears. But in judging movements like these, I think it's important to keep in mind a sense of proportionality, among other things.
The three others died of natural causes - basically the strain of the protest tipped them over with heart-attacks and strokes.
What I find interesting is these details don’t seem to be communicated by the media - leading many to think that the rioters killed five people.
I’d say that poor woman died precisely because she was brainwashed by an amorphous, cult-like movement—the very same movement behind the entire event, more or less—to think that leading an armed mob to where the members of our government’s legislative branch were taking shelter wouldn’t result in the use of force against her. So maybe the rioters didn’t kill her on an individual level, but the riot certainly did—and that’s relevant in the quantitative comparison I made in my previous comment.
The actions of a group designed to deliberately create panic and terror caused the heart attack in the assaulted. Without the rioters this people would be alive today, therefore is obvious that they killed also those people.
Why what's the second closest they got to wiping out our government?