About a month after the Jan. 6 attack, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson scoffed at those alarmed by the riot. “This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” the Wisconsin senator said. “I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms?”
In the months and years that followed, GOP lawmakers such as Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene also questioned whether the insurrectionists had guns.
As recently as last week, Donald Trump himself used his social media platform to insist, while responding to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, “The so-called ‘Insurrectionists’ that he talks about had no guns. They only had a Rigged Election.”
Such rhetoric has long been foolish, but the GOP voices who’ve questioned whether the rioters were armed looked quite a bit worse late last week. NBC News reported on John Emanuel Banuelos, who allegedly fired two gunshots at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and who was arrested by federal authorities on Friday.
Last month, Jan. 6 rioter Derrick Evans, who is now running in a Republican House primary in West Virginia, published previously unseen video that appeared to show that Banuelos actually fired his weapon twice outside the Capitol that day. Online “sedition hunters” who have aided the FBI in hundreds of arrests of Capitol rioters — and who first sent Banuelos’ name to the FBI in February 2021 — quickly surfaced additional footage that confirmed that Banuelos was the man who appeared to have fired the weapon.
NBC News’ report added, “While numerous rioters were armed with guns on Jan. 6, none were known to have actually fired their weapons; Banuelos is the first to be charged with doing so.”
That distinction is relevant. Despite Republican talk about the rioters not being armed during the pro-Trump violence, the facts have been evident for quite some time. Remember this Washington Post report from nearly two years ago?
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