[RETRACTED] Report: Lindsey Graham Demanded Police Shoot Unarmed Trump Supporters
RETRACTION, Aug. 5, 2022: The Western Journal has retracted this commentary because the facts did not support claims made by its headline or in the commentary itself. Sen. Graham was reported by The Washington Post to have told the Senate sergeant-at-arms: “You’ve got guns. Use them.” This is not the same as telling an officer to shoot someone, as guns can be used — and, in fact, are more often used by law enforcement — to threaten someone and hold them at bay, rather than to shoot them. It certainly is not tantamount to “arranging a virtual firing squad against unarmed demonstrators,” as we claimed.
We also wrote that “Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina believed the rioters should have been shot by Capitol Police upon entering the building illegally,” which is, at best, an exaggeration of what Graham reportedly said to the Senate sergeant-at-arms. Moreover, subsequent reports have shown that not all the protesters were unarmed, although it remains unclear whether any armed protesters actually entered the Capitol Building.
The protesters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were breaking the law that day. As the day unfolded, many Americans from across the political spectrum looked on with disgust and dismay.
Thankfully, the situation never escalated to a point of extreme violence, as many on the left have since claimed.
Nevertheless, according to an extensive Sunday report from The Washington Post, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina believed the rioters should have been shot by Capitol Police upon entering the building illegally.
According to the report, Graham was “irate that senators were forced to flee their own chamber.”
“What are you doing? Take back the Senate! You’ve got guns. Use them,” Graham reportedly told the Senate sergeant-at-arms.
“We give you guns for a reason,” he reiterated. “Use them.”
If the Post’s reporting can be believed, this could be damning news for Graham.
Sure, the rioters were out of line, but taking the situation to such a drastic place in such short order, arranging a virtual firing squad against unarmed demonstrators, would have been completely uncalled for.
After all, in the end, while some violence did occur during the riot, it was not even remotely as fatal as the media and left-wing establishment have been claiming.
Although 4 people died at the Capitol that day — all of them among the Trump-supporting crowd — no one was deliberately killed by the supposed “terrorist insurrectionists.”
Two of the deaths were attributed to heart attacks, the third to a drug overdose and finally, Ashli Babbitt was shot by Capitol Police.
In other words, the only killing that occurred that day was when a Capitol police officer shot at the crowd.
Furthermore, video evidence even indicates that as many as 38 percent of the protesters were waved through the west terrace doors to the Capitol by police officers.
Throughout 2020, for months on end, Americans unfortunate enough to have found themselves living in Democrat-run cities were under constant threat of having their businesses destroyed during Black Lives Matter protests.
On Jan. 6, our elected officials got a little taste of that horror and, despite being quickly evacuated and heavily protected by armed police officers, they couldn’t handle even that.
It’s good news that men like Graham weren’t the ones armed with weapons that day.
Otherwise, the Capitol incursion may have actually become the violent event leftists want us to believe it was.
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