Ability to succeed doesn't really factor into what was attempted. That is in the mind & intentions of those who were involved & instigated it. Some people were very much acting with the intent to stop the transfer of power. If you believe that successfully stopping that transfer would be a coup, then the actions of 1/6 were a coup attempt.

So, every time a few drunk people decide that they want government out and get in a brawl with the police qualifies as a coup attempt?

You seem like a smart person, why make such obviously fallacious arguments? The HN guidelines ask that you respond to the strongest interpretation of what someone is saying, within reason.

How is that fallacious? It's a direct response to the argument put forth in the comment he's replying to:

> Ability to succeed doesn't really factor into what was attempted. That is in the mind & intentions of those who were involved & instigated it.

Because the intent of the crowd was not to attack police, that was a byproduct. The intent was to disrupt the process whereby power is transferred from one leader to the other. The fallacy therefore is one of false equivalency.

No, I don't think that would be a coup attempt. I also don't see how that bears any resemblance to the events that actually took place on 1/6 when people built a scaffold & tried hunting down VP Pence to hang him on it.

If you seriously believe that heated protesters really planned to hang VP Pence, you should also believe that when BLM protesters chanted "kill a cop, save a life", they were really planning to murder all police officers in the vicinity.

When they bring the gallows, improvised weapons, gear to take hostages to a Capitol, yes.

They didn't bring any guns. How can you seriously believe they tried to take over the government by force in the most heavily armed country in the world, and not bring any guns?

Pretty easily. Guns are tools, the power of which gun people overestimate.

You had the mob of useful idiots (ie the red capped mob of idiots) expressing their support of the police by beating them, and the more serious people penetrating into the chambers and offices.

Sidearms aren’t as useful as they seem in mob situations. What are the police going to do? Line up Kent State style and just mow the crowd down?

You suppress mobs with physical force. Lots of cops, divide up the mob and gas/beat them to disperse. The administration made that impossible by refusing aid. The New Jersey State police responded before the federal authorities.

The goal wasn’t “taking over the government”. It was a coup, using the stopping of a formality from happening and providing the fig leaf needed for the other guy to hang on to power. Taking a few congressmen hostage, using them as shield, and marching them to the gallows would have stopped that.

The coup attempt was not in the form of the mob themselves taking control. It was the mob trying to disrupt the process of transferring power sufficiently enough to enable or inspire other mechanisms of action. There were, for example, calls for President Trump to declare martial law. It doesn't matter that their plan was vague, poorly coordinated, or unlikely to succeed. They intended to disrupt the transfer of power and executed their intentions violently, injuring over 100 police officers in the attempt. As any number of idiotic criminals in jail can attest to, incompetence in crime does not negate the criminal act.

It also doesn't take nearly as much effort by a mob to accomplish its goals when the people who would help stop it stand idly by: 1) Not enough security was provided in first place 2) Reinforcements took hours to mobilize 3) The President refused to take any action to defuse the situation.

If patheticness is an important qualifier, I think breaching the capitol building suffices.

The real patheticness here is the desire to call a riot with a more politically charged term "coup attempt", just because it pleases you to further vilify your political opponents.

I watched the whole thing live. It was messy at times, but it was clear as day that the mob didn't have neither a plan nor a command structure. Once they got into the chamber, they just chatted with guards! Or, in that shaman's case, just blessed everyone around.

So it was a terrible coup attempt, but it was most definitely a coup attempt.

They had plastic ties and a noose ready for the vice president and the speaker of the house (2nd and 3rd in line) to the presidency.

Did they also have enough firepower to neutralise their armed security?

Evidently. They made it into many secure areas and past the locked doors.

Just because the security didn't use lethal weapons (except that one shot). And the reason they didn't use it is because there never was any real serious threat to anyone in power. So the fact that the mob got onto the building speaks only that the security preferred to let them in (fully understanding that everyone important is already evacuated) rather than killing them to prevent them from access.

Once in the building the mob quickly figured out that they don't know what to do next, as was expected.

> So the fact that the mob got onto the building speaks only that the security preferred to let them in (fully understanding that everyone important is already evacuated)

That’s...not true. The building was breached before members were evacuated. The breakthrough and shooting at the Speakers Lobby occurred, very shortly after that room was evacuated, and where the mob, if unchecked at the chokepoint through which they had just broken, would provide an imminent and overwhelming threat to both security personnel and innocents in the process of evacuating. Security lost control of the outer perimeter and did a collapsing bubble defense to maximize safety of the heavily outnumbered security personal and the ability to protect VIPs and other innocents who had not been evacuated.

Security didn't even use tear gas.

They didn't need it, capitol police were largely on their side.

If it had been BLM, they would have shot to kill.