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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?
The full picture of how many among the crowd were armed before the riot occurred is unclear, but court records, trial testimony and accounts from police officers and rioters have supplied growing evidence that multiple people brought firearms to Washington for Jan. 6, 2021. Six men were arrested that day for having guns in the vicinity of the U.S. Capitol, and a seventh who arrived after the riot ended was arrested the following day.
The same report noted one Jan. 6 defendant explaining at his trial that from his vantage point on the west side of the Capitol, he counted eight firearms carried by five people. Other rioters have been charged with taking guns onto the Capitol grounds.
A New York Times report highlighted a series of other specific Jan. 6 rioters who were found to have carried firearms during the attack.
But according to an unsealed federal criminal complaint, at least one pro-Trump rioter didn’t just have a gun during the Jan. 6 assault, he also allegedly fired a gun during the Jan. 6 assault.
As best as I can tell, none of the Republicans who peddled the lie about “unarmed” insurrectionists have expressed any regret for having been so wrong.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.