They had gallows outside, armed participants broke into the building, some participants that got into the senate chambers were carrying soft cuffs, one group didn’t stop trying to get to capitol staff and Congresspeople until a women with them was shot.

If I was Bezos I wouldn’t shrug off a guillotine but you have to ignore a lot of what happened in DC to try to make the events and intent equal.

What were these people armed with?

Which people do you mean by “these”? The insurrectionists had pipe bombs and molotovs. No idea about the BLM or the anticapitalism stuff in the summer.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/2-pipe-bombs-and-cooler-of...

And it'll be forever hard to answer what the people in the Capitol had with them because they were just let out and weren't arrests didn't really start until that evening when supporting LE finally came in.

There are photographs and video. A truck was found parked outside the capitol filled.

They found them during the riot, not afterward.

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-inaugurati...

Having watched a chronological, narration-less series of footage from the day it does appear there was an organized contingent operating among the larger chaos.

I meant literally the people that went inside the Capitol we know those things were floating around in the crowd generally but not what the people inside had. I also saw that one LARP group heading up the stairs looking organized but IDK if they were spotted with anything particularly bad, haven't watched everything that happened for sure though.

There are photographs of people inside the chambers with cuffs and tasers. One was recently arrested for it: https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates...

I get what you're saying. In my mind, the plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan changes the priors in determining if it was purely symbolic.

Yeah, there are at least sub-factions in that group that would actually very much like to put that gallows to actual use and seemingly came prepared to actually take hostages when they got inside.

that would be more plausible if they hadn't beaten a cop to death.

The gallows were clearly for show in my opinion, but the same group also did actually storm the building and send a bunch of cops to the hospital, killing one.

I've been reading Trump spaces online for a long time and I feel strongly that a subset of those protesters absolutely would have murdered members of Congress if they got that far in time.