Ashli Babbitt, the Capitol rioter who died from a police-inflicted gunshot wound to her shoulder, has become a symbol.
To Trump supporters, she’s a martyr, which is nonsense; to some of her critics, she’s a domestic terrorist, which almost certainly is an exaggeration. By all appearances, she was a very naive person caught up in a mob frenzy.
“She is the tragedy of the modern Republican voter personified,” according to Bill Maher, a political commentator. That’s not exactly accurate, either; most Republican voters didn’t storm the U.S. Capitol in response to their candidate’s election loss.
Maybe more of them wanted to, and couldn’t be there for various reasons, but of the 74 million Trump voters in 2020, only 15,000 participated in the Capitol demonstration, and of that group, only several hundred rioted, attacked police, forced entry to the Capitol, and went hunting members of Congress.
Babbitt was one of those. That makes her something more than just a “modern Republican voter;” she also was a rioter.
Her family, of course, sees her as “a person,” not a symbol. As CNN says here, “To her family, the life Babbitt lived for 35 years was suddenly eclipsed by what they see as a distorted portrait that has emerged following her death, based in part on her own social media postings and videos in which she rants about her conservative political views and support of Donald Trump.”
That may be so, but the first thing you have to say about that “distorted portrait” is that it was self-inflicted — by her postings, rants, and actions at the Capitol.
Babbitt apparently was an Obama supporter as late as 2016, then somehow became radicalized by rightwing extremism, and began spending a lot of her time on politics. Among her last words to her brother, as she flew to Washington D.C., were these: “Nothing will stop us. They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours.”
“The storm is here. It is descending upon DC,” she tweeted while en route to Washington D.C. to prevent the man chosen by America’s voters to lead our country from taking office. She was not, that day or the next, a “tragic Republican voter.” She had become a revolutionary, an insurrectionist; and she was making the trip to overthrow our democracy. At the moment she died, she also was engaged in criminal behavior.
When she was killed by police, she was at the very front of the mob breaking into the Speaker’s Lobby, which had direct access to the House Chamber, where at that moment panicked members of Congress were hurriedly being evacuated.
Deserve has nothing to do with it. You can debate until the cows come home whether Babbitt deserved what she got, but she wasn’t shot in retribution.
She was shot to stop the mob from breaking through the thin police line and reaching the House Chamber and members of Congress. She was shot because she was at the front of the mob, the first person through the doorway the police officers were defending, and the immediate threat to whether the police line would hold. (More details of the shooting are here.) Shooting her achieved its intended purpose; it stopped the mob, the police line held, and the members of Congress escaped.
She also was shot in self-defense; investigators determined the police reasonably feared for their own safety.
The police lieutenant who shot her didn’t aim for her head or heart; he shot her in the shoulder, with a relatively low-powered pistol, and only once; this pretty clearly wasn’t intended to be a kill shot, and the police immediately rendered aid. She just happened to die. In a way, that was an accident.
He didn’t have time to ask for her biography. He didn’t know was an Air Force veteran who, at a more lucid time in her life, had honorably served our country. It’s safe to say he made no judgments about whether she was a good person or a bad person.
Deserve had nothing to do with it. From the police perspective, it was about facing a mob, and preventing a clear and present danger. That was their duty. It was why they were there.
Related story: The Republican lies about the Capitol riot still keep coming; read story here.
Photos: The corridor to the House Chamber; Babbitt breaching the door; police rendering aid
