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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (1306990)

7/8/2021 2:35:01 PM

From: Brumar89

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Demosthenes

“As former president Trump makes his return to public life in a series of rallies and, as of today, lawsuits, he’s hitting upon the death Ashli Babbitt to stoke the kind of grievance that helped propel him to victory in 2016.

Trump has happed into a real vein of outrage, one stoked by fringe activists, including Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), though for the wrong reasons.

But a look at the details of Jan. 6 and Babbitt’s shooting suggests why they’re fixated on Babbitt in particular.

To understand one reason why Babbitt’s death may be so significant requires a look at how far the pro-Trump mob got on Jan. 6.

First off, the death of anyone is tragic. And in a sense this case is all the more poignant given that Babbitt was deluded into believing a series of myths about the election. She’s also a victim.

But Babbitt was at the forefront of a part of the mob that got closer than any other group that day to reaching members of Congress.

At the time that they made it to the entryway to the Speaker’s Gallery, a hallway that leads in part to the House floor, members of Congress were still evacuating. A group of representatives were sheltering in place in the chamber as the crowd mobbed three officers guarding the door. One video, reported by the Washington Post, shows Rep. James McGovern (D-MA) on the other side of the doorway as the mob masses and member evacuate.

The sequence of events from there is fairly straightforward. Reports and videos indicate that the three officers left as a SWAT team arrived, creating a gap of around 35 seconds in which the entryway was unguarded.

Babbitt attempted to climb through a window in the door, at which point a Capitol police officer shot her.

Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a former MMA fighter who helped barricade entryways on Jan. 6, witnessed what happened.

“We didn’t have enough people to keep one door shut, much less two,” Mullin told a Tulsa, Oklahoma Fox affiliate in January. “A lieutenant went over there.”

Mullin added, for context, that “there was a mob trying to break through that door and a lot more people were going to die if they came through.”

But Mullin does something important here: he frames the officer’s decision as a last-ditch move to stop the mob from making it through to members of Congress.

“She was the first one to come through that door, unfortunately,” Mullin said, referring to Babbitt. “[The officer] had to make a split-second decision. In my opinion, he had to do what was necessary to protect people’s lives.”

Mullin has made the same point elsewhere.

“He had to take someone’s life, but in return he probably saved a whole bunch of people’s lives,” Mullin told Politico.

A review of videos of the shooting and its aftermath conveys the same impression. The crowd reacts with shock to the shooting as a team of heavily armed officers arrive on the scene.

From there, people who had been banging on the doors, breaking glass in an effort to get through, stop. Officers push them back into the hallway and away from the Speaker’s Gallery, until MPD riot squads remove them from the Capitol.

It’s with that crucial context Gosar’s and Trump’s statements take on a different tone.

It’s not only that Babbitt, a white woman, is easy to cast as a victim; her death, also, arguably, marked the high-water mark of the day — the moment at which the mob came closest to members of Congress. It was the shooting that tragically killed her, but which also sapped the mob of its momentum.

“Just boom,” Trump said in New Jersey on Wednesday, referring to the shooting. “There was no reason for that.”“

talkingpointsmemo.com