“When you hear of armed, don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would’ve liked to ask: How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?…If that was a planned armed insurrection, man, you’d really have a bunch of idiots.” — Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wi.
Here’s what one cop on the scene reported:
“The zealotry of these people is absolutely unreal,” said Hodges, who suffered from a severe headache but otherwise emerged unhurt. “There were points where I thought it was possible I could either die or become seriously disfigured.”
Still, Hodges said, he did not want to turn to his gun.
“I didn’t want to be the guy who starts shooting, because I knew they had guns — we had been seizing guns all day,” he said. “And the only reason I could think of that they weren’t shooting us was they were waiting for us to shoot first. And if it became a firefight between a couple hundred officers and a couple thousand demonstrators, we would have lost.”
“The cops weren’t searching people,” Mark Jones, a former agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives with 20 years of counterterrorism experience told NBC News in a Jan. 13, 2021, story. “I’d speculate that there were many, many more firearms that were there that were not uncovered.”
But news and official reports are filled with accounts of armed people at the Capitol.
Fourteen people tied to the Jan. 6 attack are facing federal charges related to bringing or using dangerous weapons inside the building and two are facing firearms-related charges, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
NBC News reported that within a week after the attack a dozen guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition had been found on seven people arrested before and after the Capitol riot.
Cleveland Grover Meredith, drove to Washington from Colorado with an assault-style Tavor X95 rifle with a telescopic sight, a Glock 9 mm with high-capacity magazines and more than 2,500 rounds of ammunition, including at least 320 rounds of armor-piercing bullets, NBC reported. Reuters said Meredith texted “War time” after hearing Vice President Mike Pence would count electoral votes from states Trump lost.
In the trunk of Lonnie Coffman’s vehicle, police found an AR-15-style rifle, a shotgun, a crossbow, several machetes, smoke grenades and 11 Molotov cocktails, Reuters reported. Another man, Christopher Alberts of Maryland, was stopped as he left the Capitol grounds after a police officer spotted a loaded handgun on his hip.
Many more people armed themselves by more unorthodox means, causing damage and injury.
Robert Sanford, 55, of Pennsylvania, was allegedly caught on video throwing a fire extinguisher at a group of police officers. David Blair, 26, was seen hitting officers with a lacrosse stick, NBC said. Others had pepper spray, brass knuckles, a pipe and pocket knives, and one man was carrying a “stinger whip,” a tool with blunt and whip-like edges marketed for self-defense and escaping a locked vehicle.
One rioter was caught on video beating a police officer with a flagpole bearing an American flag, NBC Washington reported. The New York Times reviewed video that showed people using stolen police shields, sticks and crutches as weapons.
And the man photographed with his feet on the desk of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was carrying a 950,000-volt stun gun walking stick, House impeachment manager Stacey Plaskett revealed Feb. 10.
Not to mention pipe bombs were found near the Capitol at Republican and Democratic party headquarters.
DC has serious gun safety laws which kept these people from waving their guns around as they do in open carry states. But they were carrying. And they certainly weren’t afraid to use whatever weapons they had at hand to wage “trial by combat.”