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Comment by etcet | Hacker News Reader

The breach of the capitol building is an embarrassment. There's not reinforced glass on the first floor windows? The secured interior is 3 cops in front of a wooden door with plate glass windows? And those cops just kinda slinked away letting a woman breach it and get insta killed? The outside perimeter is just a few cops in front of some fencing? What a fucking failure.

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Do you think it should be a fortress? That's sad. It's supposed to be an accessible place where your representatives work, not a military base.

I think it should be reasonably defensible. It's not just a failure of the architecture though. The tactics used were mostly ineffective. Defensive forces were positioned thinly with few real blockades. I saw one instance of police blocking an entrance through sheer mass and it was effective. The cops could have been done the same in the interior hallways instead of giving up their spread out weak positions. This would have prevented the use of firearms.

If you can stomach it, I ask everyone to watch the full lead up to the shot. It is an absolute failure of policing. Start at 37:20 on https://banned.video/watch?id=5ff6857e00bac0328da8e888 and yes it's NSFL (shot at 39:10).

It's a target - plain and symbol. It was the target of the 4th plane on 9/11, and it will likely be a target again.

Given the importance of the building and the people inside, it absolutely needs to be protected.

Is it sad that we need to protect things that are important to us? Yes. Should we do it anyway? Yes.

We've seen what the capital looks like when leftists protest. The security was intentionally lax and the president intentionally restricted national guard response. It was so easy because there were people inside helping them out.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ap-fact-check-trum...

> The Pentagon said Miller approved the request without speaking with the White House because he had gotten direction from the president days earlier to do whatever he deemed necessary with the Guard.

Did you read everything or just try to cherry pick something to try to spread misinformation?

"Army leaders say the delay in the movement of Guard troops to the Capitol was because the initial agreement largely limited those forces to checkpoints and Metro stations and *stipulated they would not go to the Capitol*. As a result, authorities had to get approval for the new mission, then call Guard members to the armory, brief them and get them their riot gear, and then send them to the Capitol."

Would you please stop using HN for political and ideological battle? You've been doing it repeatedly lately and it's not what this site is for, regardless of which politics you're battling for or against.

HN is for thoughtful, curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. The sets of that and political flamewar are disjoint. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd appreciate it.

So me clearing up misinformation is a problem, but other using spreading information isn't? Isn't our unwillingness to challenge this misinformation exactly why we're dealing with violent seditionists right now? Did you somehow miss an attack on the US capitol largely due to rampant spread of misinformation?

I get that it feels that way [1], but no, that's not it. You can correct misinformation without breaking the site guidelines. Plenty of HN users do that respectfully and patiently, without attacking anybody. Moreover your corrections will be more effective that way, so it's in your interest to do so.

What you can't do is destroy this community by tossing bombs of snark, flamebait, name-calling, etc., at the side you consider wrong and bad. That is something completely different, and is what we warn or ban accounts for doing.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

They literally took over the Senate building for hours during the scotus confirmation, snuck in restricted areas to harass senators, took selfies in offices while refusing to leave, and tried to block hallways and elevators, all with the stated intention of intimidating senators into changing their votes.

Zero resistance from the Police and only arrested the people who still refused to leave hours later.

Nevermind the ziptie handcuffs and tasers

Defensive tools for law abiding citizens unable to carry in a "gun-free" zone. It only show any sort of offensive ill intent to people who want it to show ill intent.

Think it through logically:

It proves adherence to the law, not intent to break it. Neither zipties or tasers are illegal, but in DC, concealed carry, or even having any personal gun is.

If the intent was to forcibly take over the capital, or some sort of insurrection, it seems silly to worry about concealed carry laws while carrying out an open "rebellion". But even so, let's say you don't want to risk killing anyone with a gun.

You still have a problem, because neither tasers nor zipties are an effective tool if you're going up against an armed federal police force and possibly hundreds of politicians and staffers. Tazers have maybe a few discharges without needing to be recharged. That's not gonna deter multiple people, let alone a crowd. Not even an individual for more than a few moments. Definitely not capital police officers with guns, who are trained to avoid and overcome being tazed, by actually being tazed.

However, if you're a law abiding citizen protesting in DC, and you want to defend yourself against a potential attacker, a tazer is basically the only option you have.

With the mayor's restrictions placed on the National Guard and police officers, it seems especially reasonable, given all the violence of the past year that police and politicians have failed to prevent, sometimes willingly.

Since tazers only disable attackers temporarily, zipties make sense as a defensive tool, if you need to disable an attacker looking enough to get away, or between the time the tazer wears off and when the police arrive. Especially if you wind up in a situation where you are somehow confined in some space, trapped with your attacker.

If people would at least try to perceive Wednesday with an open mind, it's easy to explain 99.9% as well intentioned citizens, peacefully marching.

Even with the confrontations, it's easy to see how people could have unintentionally gotten caught up in an escalated situation.

I get that not everyone was an innocent bystander. But, again, these people deserve the same benefit of the doubt that the left got when taking over the Senate building while admittedly trying to intimidate senators into changing their votes. Yet they were kneeled to in deference by the FBI, before being given unfettered access.

What the hell is defensive about zipties?

That they wanted to bring weapons into the Capitol at all is damning enough. It's a place for debate, not violence.

If you can't possess a defensive weapon capable of deterring/ detaining an attacker, if needed, for an extended period of time, until you are either able to escape, or until the police arrive...

then zipties become a useful compliment to a taser (which is only able to disable an attacker temporarily).

If you are in a position to tie someone up, you're in a position to escape. There's no way it's a self-defense weapon.

But even if it was, why would you need it in the Capitol? Sorry, but everything points to them planning to abduct the politicians they were searching for.

I suppose you could make the argument that they could detain someone who's violent for the benefit of others in the crowd, but I agree that the implied intent of storming a building with politicians lends evidence to theory that they had the intention of taking hostages.

Imagine if we had a 2008 Mumbai style terror attack with armed and organized gunman. We'd be f'ed.

We have. 5 members of Congress were shot. Jimmy Carter commuted their sentences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_sho...

Especially on a day when there was a large protest planned for a vote taking place. It's a government building and it should be reasonably open to the public but common sense needs to raise its head at some point. Securing the building for a few hours would not have been unreasonable.

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