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Comment by neartheplain | Hacker News Reader

You’re right, rioters in DC this summer only tried to storm the White House [0].

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...

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I think a useful yardstick is how many people died. IIRC a sum of around 25 deaths was attributed to all of the "BLM protests" last year, and I don't recall any police deaths that weren't eventually attributed to right-wing folks.

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.

2 people died tragically: A police officer from the effects of rioters and an unarmed female shot by a police officer.

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.

Earlier I saw a report that one of the others died because he shocked himself with a Taser while trying to pull a piece of artwork off a wall. Is that not true? Otherwise I’m not sure how this is relevant to my comment, since I explicitly called out that two of the deaths were “natural causes”.

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.

Leading many to thing -correctly- that the rioters killed five people.

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.

"Let’s not use the violent insurrection at the Capitol to downplay other violent episodes."

Why what's the second closest they got to wiping out our government?

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