Comment by lazyasciiart
2 years ago
No, shooting. I don’t think it was a meaningfully different rate than other weeks in Capitol Hill, but firefighters failing to render first aid certainly didn’t help that one kid who was dying a couple hundred yards from a fire station. (The crowd wouldn’t let a police car through, and it turns out the firefighters wouldn’t approach until the police were there and said it was safe).
Well, that's the official story given by the police. According to the protest medics who treated the shooting victim on the scene, the cops took so much time getting ready to respond - and this was independently verified by a local journalist, using hospital intake records and police scanner timestamps - that the medics gave up on the ambulance and drove the man to the ER themselves. When the police finally showed up, they were in fact told to leave, but it was not out of some political objection to emergency services: they were simply far too late to be of any use to someone who was already in the hospital at that point.
(I live just up the street from the police station at the center of the whole thing, so I paid close attention to all this stuff while it was happening.)
> firefighters failing to render first aid certainly didn’t help that one kid who was dying a couple hundred yards from a fire station
Still not terrorism. Left-wing militias are a problem in some parts of the world. They aren’t in America.
Our domestic terrorism comes almost exclusively from radical Islam and right-wing nutjobs. (Who, somewhat hilariously, see eye to eye on more than they realise.)
I suspect you're classifying the Trump assassins as right-wing nutjobs though (they weren't Islamists), which dilutes the position somewhat. What does right-wing even mean to you if it covers people trying to gun Trump down?
> What does right-wing even mean to you if it covers people trying to gun Trump down?
Is your impression that “right-wing” should designate a hive mind within which there is no conflict?
Because that's not what right-wing (or left-wing) has ever meant. The political universe isn't divided into two teams that conflict with each other but lack internal conflict.
Alternatively, I guess you might accept divisions within the Right but think that the term right-wing is defined in terms of proximity to Trump's cult of personality, but, no, while Trump is a right-wing figure (or perhaps an opportunist leveraging a right-wing base) loyalty to Trump is not what defines someone as being ”right-wing”. In either case, being violently opposed to Trump is not inconsistent with being right-wing.
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His views aren’t particularly clear, but the would-be Trump assassin does seem to have been a right-wing nutjob. I don’t see why being a right-wing nutjob would require being a Trump supporter, it just happens that most of them are at the moment.
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> suspect you're classifying the Trump assassins as right-wing nutjobs
No. Of course we've had left-wing terrorism. It's just not been as prevalent, organised or present as the right-wing form. (And I'm aware of zero currently-operating left-wing militias anyone considers a threat in America.)