Tornado Alley (PROG)

[hap0206]

here you go
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Stop Calling Jan. 6 an ‘Insurrection’
That’s a legal term that denotes much more than a sporadically violent riot or disturbance.
By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro
Jan. 5, 2022 6:12 pm ET
[snips[
But of the hundreds of “Capitol Breach Cases” listed at the Justice Department’s prosecution page, not one defendant is charged with insurrection under 18 U.S.C. 2383. That’s because insurrection is a legal term with specific elements. No prosecutor would dare mislabel negligent homicide or manslaughter a murder, because they are totally distinct crimes. The media has no legal or moral basis to do otherwise.
[...]
Other near synonyms include “rebellion,” “revolution,” “uprising,” “revolt” and “mutiny.” All require two elements, neither of which was present in the Jan. 6 breach—the organized use of violent force and the aim of replacing one government or political system with another.

A real insurrection would have required the armed forces to quell an armed resistance. Actual insurrections—apart from the Civil War—include Shays’ Rebellion in 1787, in which thousands of insurrectionists tried to seize weapons from a Massachusetts armory after months of planning to overthrow the new revolutionary government, and the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, in which 500 armed men attacked the home of a U.S. tax inspector in Western Pennsylvania. Both events required President Washington to quell the insurrections with thousands of armed troops, who killed several resistors.

The demonstrators who unlawfully entered the Capitol during the Electoral College count were unarmed and had no intention of overthrowing the U.S. constitutional system or engaging in a conspiracy “against the United States, or to defraud the United States.” On the contrary, many of them believed—however erroneously—that the U.S. constitutional system was in jeopardy from voter fraud, and they desperately lashed out in a dangerous, reckless hysteria to protect that system.
[all of it]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-calling-jan-6-an-insurrection-capitol-riot-civil-disorder-insurgency-protest-first-amendment-11641417543