Terrorists break into US Capitol Building

[Shaps]

Alright, let's talk about the laws under which we are engaging.

In the US Code we have laws against assault with the following penalties (18 USC 113):
-assault with intent to murder, up to 20 years
-assault with intent to commit a non-murder felony, up to 10 years
-assault resulting in serious bodily injury to a partner or someone younger than 17, up to 5 years
-assault without those or other specified* intents or results, up to 1 year

We also have laws against murder, with the following penalties (18 USC 1111):
-murder in the second degree, up to life
-murder in the first degree, up to death

We agree these are all violence.
We agree these are all not good.
While we may disagree on any particular penalty here, surely we agree that different penalties are appropriate for these different violences, right?

Okay. Now look again - intent, to a. We have an extremely detailed and well-settled hierarchy that often depends on to whom the violence is done, why the person is doing the violence. This has been true long before Donald J. Trump or any of us was born, it'll be true long after we're dead. We have also since the very beginning of our country decided that violence against the government is especially heinous - it's literally the only crime defined in the Constitution! This isn't some post facto justification, these are the clear rules we've all been perfectly happy to adhere to our whole lives. Which brings me back to my asterisk:

*18 USC 111 specifies that if there is an assault that against a normal citizen like you or me would only carry a penalty up to 1 year, but is instead an assault against a member of the government, the penalty goes up to 8 years. If the assault against a normal citizen like you or me would only carry a penalty up to 10 years, against a member of the government the penalty goes up to 20 years.

.

But maybe you don't agree with any of that.
Maybe you think we should Rubicon III it and any act of violence should carry the same penalty.
And I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't believe.
All I'm telling you is that the definition of hypocrite isn't someone not believing what you believe.

And almost all Americans and absolutely all of our law don't believe as you propose.
They can completely coherently have one response to BLM and another to insurrection.
Because they wrote all the rules down long before any of this happened, and that's what the rules unambiguously say.

Use the laws when convenient, ignore them when they are not. Our politicians do it very well.

Edit: Also I'm speaking more from the perspective of.. I would never initiate such violence, but if it were attempted on myself.. then I'm okay meeting violence with violence to defend myself. Or if people are committing violent acts against an innocent, I'm fine with violence as a deterrent also. The thing I hate is when people create rationales for certain types of violence, then say "wait you can't commit violence back"!