These dudes with anti-government rhetoric everywhere I hear (they are pretty vocal now) and the dude who exploded the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh sound kind of familiar to me. This is from Wikipedia on Timothy McVeigh:
——————————————-
1993 Waco siege and gun shows
In 1993, he drove to Waco, Texas during the Waco Siege to show his support. At the scene, he distributed pro-gun rights literature and bumper stickers, such as “When guns are outlawed, I will become an outlaw.” He told a student reporter:
The government is afraid of the guns people have because they have to have control of the people at all times. Once you take away the guns, you can do anything to the people. You give them an inch and they take a mile. I believe we are slowly turning into a socialist government. The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control.[24]
For the five months following the Waco Siege, McVeigh worked at gun shows and handed out free cards printed up with Lon Horiuchi’s name and address, “in the hope that somebody in the Patriot movement would assassinate the sharpshooter.” (Horiuchi is an FBI sniper and some of his official actions have drawn controversy, specifically his shooting and killing of Randy Weaver’s wife while she held an infant child.) He wrote hate mail to the sniper, suggesting that “what goes around, comes around,” and he later considered putting aside his plan to target the Murrah Building to target Horiuchi, or a member of his family instead.[25]
McVeigh spent more time on the gun show circuit,[when?] traveling to 40 states and visiting about 80 gun shows. McVeigh found that the further west he went, the more anti-government sentiment he encountered, at least until he got to what he called “The People’s Socialist Republic of California.”[26] McVeigh sold survival items and copies of The Turner Diaries. One author said:
In the gun show culture, McVeigh found a home. Though he remained skeptical of some of the most extreme ideas being bandied around, he liked talking to people there about the United Nations, the federal government and possible threats to American liberty.[27]
———————-[/quote]
So, you belive the government did the right thing by killing the people at Waco, or killing member of the Weaver family? What do you think justifies the government’s actions in these two cases?
Some background on the Ruby Ridge incident:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms first became aware of Weaver in July 1986 when he was introduced to an ATF informant at a meeting of the Aryan Nations. Weaver had been invited by Frank Kumnick, who was the original target of the ATF investigation. It was Weaver’s first attendance. Over the next three years, Weaver and the informant met several times.[7] In October 1989, the ATF claimed that Weaver sold the informant two sawed-off shotguns, with the overall length of the guns shorter than the legal limit set by federal law. By this time, Weaver had had a falling-out with both Kumnick and the Aryan Nations. In November 1989 Weaver accused the ATF informant of being a spy for the police; Weaver later wrote he had been warned by “Rico V.”[11] The informant’s handler, Herb Byerly, ordered him to have no further contact with Weaver. Eventually, FBI informant Rico Valentino outed the ATF informant to Aryan Nations security.[12]
ATF agent Byerly had come to regard Kumnick as just a “boastful show-off” and Weaver as even less involved. In June 1990, Byerly attempted to use the sawed-off shotgun charge as leverage to get Weaver to act as an informant for his investigation into the Aryan Nations.[10] When Weaver refused to become “a snitch,” the ATF filed the gun charges in June 1990, also claiming Weaver was a bank robber with criminal convictions (those claims were false: at that time Weaver had no criminal record and the subsequent Senate investigation found: “Weaver was not a suspect in any bank robberies.”[10]) Weaver denied the sawed-off weapons charge, claiming that the informant had purchased two legal shotguns from him and later shortened the guns. A federal grand jury later indicted him in December 1990 for making and possessing, but not for selling, illegal weapons in October 1989.[7]
“Former Davidian Marc Breault claimed that Koresh had “M16 lower receiver parts”[15] (combining M16 trigger components with a modified AR-15 lower receiver possibly constitutes the manufacture of a firearm that would be classified as a machine gun;[26] the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 outlawed civilian ownership of any newly manufactured machine guns manufactured after the date of enactment[27]). According to the Affidavit presented by ATF investigator David Aguilera to U.S. Magistrate Dennis G. Green on February 25, 1993, the Branch Davidian gun business (the “Mag Bag”, Route 7, Box 555-B, Waco, Texas, 76705, located on Farm Road number 2491), had purchased many legal guns and gun parts from various legal vendors (such as 45 semi-automatic AR-15 lower receivers from Olympic Arms). Deliveries by UPS for the “Mag Bag” were accepted and paid for at Mount Carmel Center by Woodrow Kendrick, Paul Fatta, David Koresh or Steve Schneider. These purchases were traced by Aguilera through the normal channels used to track legal firearms purchases from legal vendors. None of the weapons and firearms were illegally obtained nor illegally owned by the “Mag Bag”; however, Aguilera affirmed to the judge that in his experience, in the past other purchasers of such legal gun parts had modified them to make illegal firearms. The search warrant was justified not on the basis there was proof that the Davidians had purchased anything illegal, but on the basis that they could be modifying legal arms to illegal arms, and that automatic weapon fire had been reported on the compound.[28] When the reports of automatic fire were first received, Steve Schneider and David Koresh showed[citation needed] the County Sheriff’s Department a “Hellfire” device, a quick-firing trigger sold with an ATF letter certifying that the device was not a machine gun.
The affidavit of ATF investigator David Aguilera for the search warrant claimed that there were over 150 weapons and 8,100 rounds of ammunition in the compound. The paperwork on the AR-15 components cited in the affidavit showed they were in fact legal semi-automatics; however, Aguilera told the judge: “I know based on my training and experience that an AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle practically identical to the M-16 rifle. […] I have been involved in many cases where defendants, following a relatively simple process, convert AR-15 semi-automatic rifles to fully automatic rifles of the nature of the M-16. […] Often times templates, milling machines, lathes and instruction guides are used by the converter.”[29] Aguilera stated in the affidavit and later testified at trial that a neighbor had heard machine-gun fire. However Aguilera failed to tell the magistrate that the same neighbor had previously reported the noise to the local Waco sheriff, who investigated the neighbor’s complaint. Paul Fatta, who was also involved in the failed takeover of the group in 1987, told The New York Times that Koresh and he had visited the sheriff after the surveillance had been spotted and claimed that the sheriff’s office told them their guns were legal.[30]”
In both cases, law enforcement used questionable tactics in order to establish that illegal (?) activity had occurred. In neither case did they have the right to kill multiple (innocent?) people.
