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First, police officers and Secret Service are trained in such circumstances to shor for the head. Regardless, the Babbitt doubtless didn't present an easy target to shoot for the legs or arms or any other body part. She almost certainly -- I think -- did not expect to be risking her life. But that was not an issue to the lawman who shot her. His duty was to protect the people in his charge. He shot to kill. It is possibly the kind of killing act that has him staying up nights because of remorse. But he did his duty.

Second, mass executions are not a pretty thing to contemplate and an even less pretty thing to see. But I can't help thinking about what kindness did for America when President Johnson laid a velvet hand on the traitors, the very men who sought to destroy America and to maintain their ante bellum status made rich by the buying, selling and raping of black people, whipping them unconscious for trivial things, selling babies away from their mothers, in order to make money. As a result of the soft treatment of these awful men, the South, in effect, rose again and today the spawn of those traitors are the very people who are seeking to destroy America -- again. Had Lincoln not been assassinated, their fate would likely have been less soft. And, yes, I doubt Lincoln would have ordered mass executions -- but he would have left it up to the courts to decide what men guilty of the worst forms of treason should suffer for their crimes. Johnson showed his drunken loyalties to the so-called "Lost Cause," and so black people were left only "technically" better off than they were as slaves.

I don't think the good people of America would tolerate what I suggested. Mass executions might be too much for them to accept. But, certainly, the traitors of January 6th would have been subjected to the penalties provided by law, penalties that would have included lengthy, perhaps lifetime prison sentences. And I suppose that spectacle would have been sufficient to make the point that Democracy is so important that any attempt to destroy it merits contempt and severe punishment.

Sorry for the ramble. And I do understand your reasoning. I pretty much agree with your attitude and feelings in the matter. But I am angry and grow angrier by the day at the morons on the Right who want to canonize people like Babbitt as heroes when all of them need to be remembered as the worst kind of traitors.