The recent siege on the US Capitol seems like history repeating himself all over again. A series of attacks have been recorded over the years and we are going to discuss in this article.
On July 2, 1915, a former German professor at Harvard, Erich Muenter, planted a package containing three sticks of dynamite in the Capitol near the Senate Reception room. The explosive detonated around midnight and during a time when the Senate had been on recess. An on-duty Capitol Police officer was nearly knocked out of his chair during the blast, but fortunately, no one was injured. The German-born man later wrote a letter to a Washington, D.C. newspaper saying he had planted the explosives to protest U.S. wartime aid to Britain and said he hoped the detonation would “make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamour for war.” He then travelled to the home of J.P. Morgan in Long Island, New York and shot the financier. Morgan’s wounds proved superficial and he survived. Muenter was soon captured and detained in jail where, several days later, he committed suicide.
On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican Americans fired guns in the House of Representatives, injuring five congressmen. The attackers said they acted to demand independence for the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. (Puerto Ricans have U.S. citizenship but can’t vote for president and have no voting representatives in Congress.) The injured congressmen survived, and the four shooters received prison sentences. President Jimmy Carter commuted one of their sentences in 1977 and granted clemency to the other three in 1979.
On March 1, 1971, a bomb exploded in the Capitol building. While the explosion did not injure anyone, it caused some $300,000 in damage. A group calling itself the Weather Underground claimed to be behind the bombing and said it was in protest of the ongoing U.S.-supported bombing of Laos.
Thirteen years later, on November 7, 1983, a bomb tore through the second floor of the Senate wing of the Capitol. The device detonated late in the evening and no one was harmed, but it caused an estimated $250,000 in damage. A group calling itself the Armed Resistance Unit later claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for military actions in Grenada and Lebanon. Seven people were eventually arrested in connection with the attack.
Political causes aside, individuals have committed acts of violence on Capitol grounds through the decades. These incidents include an 1890 fatal shooting sparked by a feud between a reporter and a former congressman and a 1998 fatal shooting of two Capitol Police officers in 1998 by a man who claimed the U.S. was plagued by cannibalism and a fictional disease.
On January 6, 2021, on a day when representatives met to formalize the presidential election results, hundreds of rioters supporting President Donald Trump and seeking to overthrow President-Elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory pushed through police barricades and stormed the Capitol, some smashing windows to enter its halls. One woman was fatally struck by police gunfire inside the Capitol during the mayhem and a Capitol Police officer died a day later from injuries he sustained while confronting the rioters. Three other people died in the Capitol area after experiencing medical emergencies during the riot.
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