Comparing January 6th to Other Riots

Some precincts of our media have been exerting considerable effort over the last eight months to persuade us that the January 6th Capitol riot was one of the worst episodes of mob violence in our history, and they seem determined to fix those riots in our national consciousness as a "right-wing insurrection."

Real Clear Investigations (RCI), however, has actually done the journalistic work of researching and compiling a side by side table of data comparing the January 6th riot with the riots that followed the George Floyd homicide and the riots which followed Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017. The comparison is helpful.

Among the key facts listed by RCI are these (The first number is for the Capitol riots, the second is for the George Floyd riots, the third is for the 2017 inauguration riots):

• Police Officer Fatalities: 0; 1; 0
• Police Officers Assaulted/Injured: 140; 2037; 12
• Non-Officers Who Died: Ashli Babbitt, 3 others; 6-20+; 0
• Arrests: >570; 16,241; 234
• Federal Assault Charges: >175; 44; 101
• Weapons Charges: >60; 79; 0 (The types of weapons were very much different in terms of lethality. See the data at the link)
• Estimated Damage: $1.5 Million; $1-$2 Billion; >$100,000
• Duration: ~5 hours from initial violence to order; Weeks; 30 minutes
• Scope: Single event, single location; ~8,700 events, 574 involving violent acts; 140+ cities; Single event at multiple locations in one city

There's much more information at the link, but based on the above, whatever one thinks of any of these events, it's ludicrous to portray the Capitol riots as more serious than the riots that rocked the country in the wake of the George Floyd killing.