> The disturbing thought is "would they be in jail had they succeeded in dragging Pence bodily out and hanging him?"

We're fully into the realm of hypotheticals now, but I suspect not, and we would be in a new history written by the victors - terrifying as that would be.

> As an engineer, that makes me question the robustness of the protections.

Rightly so. And maybe we would be in another rotten phase of bloodshed and chaos. But as a fellow engineer, maybe with a little more scepticism, I question whether an engineering approach to human destiny is such a great stance. Without asking "Protection of what, for whom, from who, and to what end?" we're trying to engineer against change in the abstract, without a full understanding of what that might be.

After all that's happened, all those people who supported Trump are still around, and still harbouring their disaffected ideas. We must deal with them as we find them, as fellow humans.

Silencing any group, no matter how much we disagree with them is only a road to more trouble.

Anyway, I'll probably miss further in this thread, so an interesting and thoughtful exchange, Thankyou.