Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 10

Greg Gibson: Stop The Gun.

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Our
son Galen was killed in a school shooting in 1992. In the aftermath of
shootings like the ones that have taken place recently in Texas and Ohio, and
then in Texas again, friends still send emails and texts. They can imagine the
pain such incidents evoke, and they want us to know that they’re thinking about
us.

 As
much as we appreciate these expressions of love and support, and as important
as they’ve been to our survival, they’re somewhat off the mark by now. Mass
shootings no longer re-awaken the trauma and pain that accompanied Galen’s
senseless murder. The fact is, my family doesn’t follow the reports of these
incidents very closely. My wife and daughter spend time with friends on social
media. My son and I are addicted to what sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy once
referred to as Moron Sports Talk Radio. A survival tactic, no doubt.

 When
I do turn my attention to reports of mass shootings, I’ve begun to notice a
formulaic aspect to way this news is delivered. Reports are likely to feature
the 911 call, squad cars and SWAT teams responding, smartphone footage recorded
during seconds or minutes of mortal terror, traumatized survivors weeping and
hugging, and ambulances wheeling away. The perpetrator, of course, is of
interest. Sometimes we even get a mug shot of the crazed young man. We
desperately need to know, and we will never know, Why did he do it? If we could
figure that out, we think, we might be able to prevent the next one from
happening. So we read on. Mass shootings account for only about 2% of gun
deaths each year, and yet they suck up a far greater percentage of our
attention.

 Without
our even being aware of it, we’ve entered into a sort of symbiotic relationship
with the phenomenon of mass shootings. The news media commodify reports of
these horrific events as “content” and we unwittingly consume this
content along with the rest of the news. Not because we need more data in our
tireless quest to end gun violence, but because these reports feed our news
habit.

 We
know that mass shootings have become creepy memes that morph and evolve on the
basis of information gathered from prior shootings. Yet we continue to make
that information available – in mind-boggling abundance – to the next wave of
racists and madmen. I understand that there is not a conscious conspiracy
between the news media and the forces of evil. But I do believe the time has
come to take a hard look at the role the media play in this problem.

 It’s
clear by now that cultural change will be an important factor in reducing gun
violence. It’s equally clear that, as much as reporters rely on cultural
activity to create content, the content they create helps shape the culture
upon which they report.

 Why
do we not hear more about the destructive effects of gun violence – 100 deaths
each day – on families and communities, particularly among people of color?
Where is the reporting on the devastation that trails in the wake of suicide
with firearms by teens, vets, and law enforcement officers – which has risen by
30% since 2013? Why do we not hear more about the link between ownership of
firearms and domestic violence?

 In
my experience, people who are affected on a daily basis by gun violence –
people of color who live in specific, socially isolated areas in almost any big
city – hardly ever ask why? They’re more interested in how. Ruth Rollins, one
of the founding members of Boston’s Operation LIPSTICK told me that when
someone is killed in her neighborhood the first thing people want to know is
where the gun came from? How did it get into the shooter’s hands? She said,
“If you stop that gun you stop a shooting.”

 We
need to dispense with the 911 tapes, the second-by-second descriptions of the
carnage, the postmortem psychological profiling, and the gnashing of teeth over
warning signs disregarded.

 Let’s
talk instead about what kind of gun did what kind of damage. We need solid
reporting on how the shooter got his hands on the weapons he used, and where
they came from. It’s as true in your town as it is on the streets of Roxbury,
Massachusetts or El Paso, Texas.

 You
stop that gun and you stop a shooting.

Walmart Versus Shannon Watts: Guess Who Wins?

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https://www.businessinsider.com/nra-issues-official-statement-against-walmart-open-carry-ban-2019-9

The announcement by Walmart that their stores will no longer sell handgun or assault-rifle ammunition is, if nothing else, a testimony to the hard work and energy of our friend Shannon Watts which has been on display now for the past six years. Shannon began a national gun-control campaign shortly after Sandy Hook focusing on women, particularly women with children, and using public spaces where most women could be found, namely, at the entrance to retail stores, Walmart being at the top of her list.

I remember seeing a group of red-shirted women from MOMS marching in front of the entrance to a Walmart store in 2015.  I had often seen other public advocacy efforts in front of this store, usually people asking shoppers to sign a petition to get someone on the ballot of the upcoming election in the nearby town. But I had never previously encountered anyone marching in front of any public space with messaging that had to do with guns.

Of course right now Shannon’s Walmart strategy has had plenty of help, unfortunately help of the wrong kind. Because until recently, mass shootings were still infrequent enough that if you gave it a couple of days, like any other natural disaster, the media would stop talking about it and public concerns about gun violence would subside. But lately, it seems like once every week a bunch of people get mowed down in a public space.

We’re
not talking about an ‘epidemic’ of mass shootings, which means an event which
creates a lot of injuries but occurs only from time to time. We are talking
about something which, to quote our friend Katherine Christoffel, has become
‘endemic,’ i.e., it’s happening all the time.

The
significance of Walmart’s announcement lies in the fact that retail chains tend
to watch each other in the same way that drugstore chains are usually clustered
where they can keep an eye on what each chain is promoting in a particular
week. If overall revenues for Walmart don’t take a hit from this announcement,
which I suspect they won’t, it would come as no surprise if other discount
chains follow suit. And nobody, but nobody cared when the NRA whined
about Walmart’s ‘shameful’ decision.

On the
other hand, my friends in Gun-control Nation need to understand that the
importance of Walmart’s announcement is much more a symbolic gesture rather
than representing anything real. Not that symbols aren’t important – all
advocacy relies on symbolic messaging to get their arguments across. But let’s
not kid themselves into thinking that a decision by Walmart to pull out of the
gun business will have any real impact on injuries from guns.

My gun shop is located less than a mile from a Walmart. The store was never a competitive element when it came to gun sales, because Walmart doesn’t sell handguns and never sold used guns of any kind. And generally speaking, what creates foot traffic in every gun retailing establishment are handguns and used guns of all sorts.

Where Walmart did hurt me was in ammunition sales because there was simply no way I could compete with a big-box’s pricing structure for a commodity as common as ammunition, particularly calibers bought in bulk, like 22LR for target shooting and shotgun shells. But these calibers don’t represent the type of ammo which trauma surgeons have to dig out of people’s chests or heads. I can guarantee you that if I were still doing retail ammunition sales, that within 30 minutes after Walmart’s announcement, my gun wholesaler would have contacted me with a ‘great deal’ on 9mm and 40 S&W rounds.

The real importance of the Walmart announcement is that it places the issue squarely where it belongs – on products that have nothing to do with sporting or hunting guns. In this respect, Shannon has won a major victory that pushes the gun business back to where it really belongs.

Khalil Spencer: It’s Not About Assault Rifles, It’s About Assaults On Decency.

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Along with the current discussion about gun control, assault
rifle bans, and domestic terrorism, Uncle Sam is working on reinvigorating the
nuclear weapons program in New Mexico and South Carolina. Given that a few of
us in Northern New Mexico are affiliated with certain large Federal
installations involved with making things that can create very large holes in
the ground, I see a lot of chatter about both topics. This leaves me uneasy.



Guns and bombs are necessary evils albeit fascinating creations when not
employed for their intended purpose. That’s why people enjoy shooting sports,
especially with military design rifles, for example, as described here
and here.
But lethal weapons are solutions of last resort to real problems. Whether
someone is kicking down your door or your frontier at o-dark thirty, you need a
way to defend yourself. The problem is, when things get to the point of a
shooting war, whether in the kitchen or the Ardennes, the less destructive
solutions have failed or have been ignored. Cleaning up the blood and lost
treasure gets more complicated as weapons become more advanced. During the
American Revolution, a few thousand soldiers faced each other and opened fire
when they could see the whites of each others eyes. The American Civil War,
which bled America white, was the harbinger of WW I with trench warfare and the
introduction of modern weapons. Nowadays, advanced heavy weapons and highly
lethal infantry weapons (not to mention, nukes) can blow somewhat larger holes
in the other side’s strategic interests. High capacity semiauto weapons can
drench the neighborhood with a rainsquall of full metal jacket (or jacketed
hollow point, I suppose). Or as Bruce Cockburn once
sang, “who put that bullet hole in
Peggy’s kitchen wall?”. Nowadays, it would be more than one hole. I think
Bruce thought up that song when people generally shot at each other with
revolvers.



Things won’t get better if we concentrate on more guns and bombs as solutions.
There are more of us in the U.S. (and of course on the planet) and here at
home, resources are becoming more unequal, leading to rising stress. Our
civilization’s reliance on dinosaur juice, methane, and coal to power our cars,
homes, and other stuff is on track to double atmospheric CO2 concentrations
over Holocene levels by mid-century. This will, by most reputable accounts,
lead to global energy retention via the Tyndall effect resulting in heating on
the order of 1.5-4 degrees C and the associated climate adjustments that likely
are associated with warming (sea level rise, changes in regional precipitation,
changes in average temperatures, more extreme weather due to changes in the jet
streams, etc). As an aside, note the uncertainties here. We can predict the big
picture, but not the details, hence the constant bickering.



If you think forced migration due to climate and political problems is bad now,
I suggest a friendly trip in the time machine to see what things will look like
in a few decades. For those who are skeptical of forward climate models, we
have plenty of historical geochemical records suggesting significant change is
likely in the century to come. Even on the regional scale, we see the results
on societies of past climate change in the abandoned settlements of the
American Southwest and Greenland. I wrote something for the Albuquerque Journal
about that here.
Far fewer humans lived back then, so there were places to resettle. Where do
people resettle in a few years, as their wells run dry and crops wither, now
that we live in a No Vacancy world?

Our
ability since the Industrial Revolution to change atmospheric chemistry and
thus the atmosphere’s ability to retain the sun’s heat, in a nutshell, is why
humans can profoundly – at least with respect to our own existence – impact
climate.

— me, in the Albuquerque Journal

My guess is we will probably deal with climate change using guns and bombs,
since that seems to be the historical tradition. Yes, I am increasingly
pessimistic. With the world order drifting towards authoritarianism,
nationalism, xenophobia, and ethnic/racial extremism and increasingly, with
people showing up unannounced at each other’s national doorsteps, I think the
stresses will overcome reason. Plus, its been 74 years since we had a world
war. Few living today remember what a world war looks like and frankly, I worry
that today’s leaders can only see war as an abstraction. Reagan and Gorbachev
knew WW II. Putin and Trump do not. My parent’s generation, now pretty much
gone, saw it in its smoke, blood, and destruction filled reality.



The bottom line is if we continue to fixate on using Maslow’s Handgun to stave
off change rather than hunkering down to fix what is broken, we will kick the
underlying problems down the road until a crisis overcomes us and we solve the
problems with…guns and bombs. Its the way Homo sapiens has always done it
before. Why change now? Because the guns and bombs are too lethal to use?
That’s the underlying idea behind deterrence, but it assumes rational actors
acting in their best interest. Hmmm. Does anyone see a potential problem with
that assumption? Orwell did:

The
passage in the Declaration of Independence that starts, “We hold these truths
to be self-evident,” with its references to equality, liberty, and happiness,
is literally impossible to translate into Newspeak. “The nearest one could come
to doing so,” Orwell wrote, “would be to swallow the whole passage up in the
single word crimethink.”

— Tom Stern, discussing Orwell’s idea of Newspeak.

As Kurt Vonnegut, who himself rode out the WW II Dresden firebombing,
ironically enough in a slaughterhouse, would say, “So it goes“.
Unless we choose otherwise.

Hello Again.

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After I ran yesterday’s column saying that I was closing down this site, I received a great number of emails from readers who wished me all the best but also stated that they were less than happy that MiketheGunGuy was coming to an end. I was actually quite overwhelmed by the response.

So I have decided to keep the blog alive but will contribute only an occasional column because I don’t want my writing to interfere with the promise I made to Katy Palfrey and the Conservation Centers to help them move ahead. In fact, I will probably post some columns about that remarkable effort as well.

Once again I want to ask everyone to consider contributing their thoughts to this blog. I make no editorial requirements of any kind (topic, content, length) as long as you refrain from profanity and personal insults of any kind. And I’m not even concerned about whether you send me a post about something other than guns.

Again, I want to thank everyone who sent me a note asking that I remain active in this space. It’s nice to know that I have built an audience which enjoys what I say, in agreement or not.

It’s Been Fun.

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This column will be my 1,412th piece published on this website since May 2, 2013. It will also be the last. Don’t worry – I’m feeling fine and will be around, but it’s time I move onto other things.

Last month I agreed to help a group called Conservation Centers for Animal Survival organize a national fundraising campaign and I simply do not have the time to engage in that important activity and continue to operate this blog.

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I hope my efforts here have created some food for thought and I will certainly continue to stay involved in the gun debate.

I want to thank my many Contributing Editors for the articles they wrote, as well as the many readers who took the time to send comments about site content which either excited them or pissed them off. I enjoyed what everyone had to say.

Best wishes and thanks again for your interest in my little endeavor.

Why Do We Believe That A Gun Keeps Us Safe?

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              Our friends at UC-Davis have just published
an article on the connection between increased gun sales and gun-injury rates. The
good news about the article is that it is open source, which means you can download
it here and read it for free. So I commend Garen Wintemute and his colleagues
for giving everyone in Gun-control Nation an opportunity to share their
research findings for free.

              That’s the good news. After I summarize their research
and what they learned, I’m going to mention the bad news. And the bad news is what
Wintemute and his research team didn’t bother to learn. But first, here’s see what
they learned.

              The research covers a ‘spike’ in handgun sales in
California in California following the 2012 re-election of The Bomber and the
Sandy Hook massacre, two events that occurred within a space of five weeks. The
authors define a ‘spike’ as a “sharp and short-lived increase in firearm
sales.”  From this, the authors then
attempt to test the following hypothesis, namely, that “the sudden and
unanticipated influx of firearms in a concentrated area such as a city could
result in increases in firearm harm.” The research covered injury data
from 499 California cities along with a complete run of handgun sales which are
recorded individually and kept by the California DOJ.)

              Here’s where I have to raise a small, red flag. The
authors claim that they measured the spike in gun sales from the date of
Obama’s election until six weeks post-Sandy Hook. But what this analysis fails
to consider is whether the spike was only a response to those two events rather
than reflecting the release of pent-up demand which developed prior to Obama’s
second win.

              I spent the entire Summer and Fall of 2012 sitting by
myself in my gun shop because I didn’t know one, single gun nut who thought
that Romney wasn’t going to be inaugurated President in 2013. Even Romney
believed this fantasy and so did everyone else. Which is why gun sales
collapsed during the run-up to that election, because everyone knows that when
the White House is occupied by a Republican, the gun business goes into the
toilet, prices collapse and why not wait a few months before buying your next
gun? After all, it’s not as if anyone needs to buy another gun.

              If the UC-Davis researchers wanted to get a clear
picture of the post-election spike, what they should have done was to factor in
the trend of gun sales before the cataclysmic event took place. Gun
sales always pick up in November and over the next three to four months, but
the comparison should be judged not just by looking forward in time, but also
by looking back.

              Did the researchers find an ‘association’ between the
gun spike in November-December and an increase in gun injuries over the following
year? Of course they did, although the percentage of gun injuries (4%) was
substantially less than the percentage increase of handguns that were floating
around. Again, I am somewhat leery of how the research team computed what they
refer to as ‘excess handguns’ (meaning more guns being sold than were usually
the case) because of the issue of pent-up demand.

Okay,
now here comes the bad news.

We have
all kinds of evidence that gun sales spike after mass shootings or other events
that might portend new regulations reducing the availability of guns. Much of
this research is referenced by the UC-Davis team. But to me, the question that
really matters and that nobody in the public health research domain seems
interested in understanding is this: Why do some people actually believe that a
gun will protect them from the kind of harm represented by what took place at
Sandy Hook?

If
public health researchers like Wintemute and his colleagues would sit down and
try to figure that one out, maybe just maybe we could hold a reasonable
discussion with gun owners about the risk of owning those guns.

Is that
too much to ask?

How Do We Protect Ourselves From Guns?

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This happens to be the question which at the moment appears to be driving the 2020 campaign. Even the noisemakers who are promoting Trump seem to think that he can only help himself renew the lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if he comes out with a legislative package that will at least appear to contain some kind of gun-control ideas.

Now it comes as no surprise that The [failing] New York Times is urging passage of a gun-control bill. Big frickin’ deal (to quote Trump’s use of a time-honored expletive right out of any barroom in Queens.) But when The New York Post runs a lead editorial which tells Trump to make gun control Priority Number One, that’s not just a horse of a different color, it’s a different animal altogether and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

The last time I looked, the two ideas which appear to have the best chance of winding up on the President’s desk are a ‘red flag’ law, which just about everyone seems to feel will make some bit of difference to controlling the carnage even though no doubt there will be the usual whining about giving the courts the ability to ‘steamroll’ the Bill of Rights.

The other band-aid to be put on the gun problem will probably be what is referred to as ‘universal background checks,’ which means more work for the FBI-NICS examiners in West Virginia, more complaining by the ATF about how they don’t have the resources to go after everyone who fails a background check now, never mind the many millions of people who will fail the check when every gun transfer has to first be approved.

Both of these bills, however, will help satisfy what has always been the guiding narrative of the gun-control movement, namely, keeping guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’ Now many of these ‘wrong hands’ belong to individuals who couldn’t pass a background check if their lives depended on it. Other ‘wrong hands’ are connected to the arms of people who wake up one morning and go wandering around town with an AR-15, telling everyone they bump into that last night the Martians really did land at Area 51. The latter bunch will be hauled into some courtroom and learn that in the interests of both public and personal safety, a red flag is waving and they can go home without their gun.

With all due respect to my friends in both the Gun-nut and Gun-control Nations who are considering whether to support these ideas, I just want to point out a little problem with this approach. According to the FBI, somewhere around 40% of all gun homicides are committed by individuals who can’t have legal access to a handgun of any kind for the simple reason that they have not yet attained the age of 21. Buy an AR? Yep. Buy a Glock? Federal law says no siree.

When Marvin Wolfgang studied homicides in Philadelphia committed in Philadelphia between 1948 and 1952, it turned out that roughly 20% of nearly 600 murders were committed by individuals under age 25. And only one-third of them ended someone else’s life by using a gun. Now we have a younger population doing more of the murders each year and two-thirds commit these fatal assaults by using a gun.

I’m not against either comprehensive background checks or red flags, not one bit. I just hope everyone realizes that the problems that may be solved by these laws are jjust the beginning of ending gun violence, not the end.

What Should We Do About Gun Violence?

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              Our friends at March For Our Lives
have just issued an impressive document, A Peace
Plan for a Safer America, which can be downloaded here. If the server traffic keeps you from pulling it off the cloud, you can
also go to my website and download the report here. The document, or better yet the
proclamation, begins like this: “The next President must act with a fierce
urgency to call this crisis what it is: a national public health
emergency.”

              The good
news is that the Parkland kids and their allies aren’t operating under any
illusion that the current Administration will get anything done. The only
problem is that I’m also not sure that the ‘next’ President won’t be named
Trump. Unless of course we are talking about 2024. But that’s a long way off,
which means that in the interim at least another 185,000 or more Americans will
massacre themselves or others with guns. So what should we be trying to do
about it now?

              The Peace
Plan lists what is called six ‘bold’ steps, none of which are particularly or
different from what we have seen before. There’s Cory’s idea for a national gun
licensing system, repeal PLCCA which is a standard gun-control demand, cut the
gun-violence rate in half although Lizzie says she will figure out a way to
reduce it by 80 percent, support community-based, anti-violence groups, and two
new, rather clever ideas. The first is that the President should name a
gun-violence czar who would coordinate all federal gun-control efforts as well
as give out a much bigger chunk of research about guns; the second is to push
for a domestic peace corps for gun violence that will be called the ‘Safety
Corps.’  I like that idea; it’s actually
different and new.

              What
concerns me, and I trust what I now say will be taken in the same constructive
manner in which I have read and evaluated this plan, is that the only mention
of law enforcement is in a paragraph about the need to produce ‘better
policing’ so as to cut down on gun violence committed by the cops. What about
the fact that right now the odds of someone getting arrested for committing a non-fatal gun
assault are roughly one out of five. Don’t the cops deserve some more resources
considering the fact that probably somewhere around 75,000 people are gunned
down every year and survive simply because the shooter didn’t shoot
straight? 

              We seem to
have a serious problem in this country when it comes to talking about gun
violence because the discussion always ends up looking primarily at the victims
(call them ‘survivors’ if you will) with scant attention being paid to the
individuals who shoot the guns.  In fact,
while gun suicides claim more than 20,000 casualties every year, the total
number killed and wounded in felonious assaults is now probably around 90,000,
although we really don’t know a good number because the CDC has decided
that its estimates for non-fatal shootings can no longer be used. So much for
the public health ‘approach’ to gun violence.

              The bottom
line is that somewhere between 75% and 85% of all gun injuries happen to be
crimes. And we can express all the concern we want about the root causes of
criminal behavior, but when someone walks down the street and gets hit by a
bullet that happens to be flying by, the injury isn’t going to be somehow less
serious because that guy just spent the afternoon cleaning up a vacant
lot. 

              Again, I
want to make it clear that I share the frustrations and concerns of everyone in
Gun-control Nation who would like to see us turn a corner and really do
something meaningful and successful about the violence caused by guns. But as
often as they make mistakes or give in to popular prejudices,
when it comes to gun violence, the cops aren’t causing 125,000 gun injuries
every year. And neither is it the fault of the crazies, not the guns, to quote
Number 45.

              It’s the
guns, stupid. The small, concealable handguns occasionally mixed in with an AR.

August 21: Flag Day And Ruby Ridge Day.

From our friends at Ammo.com.

The Siege at Ruby Ridge is often considered a pivotal date in American history. The shootout between Randy Weaver and his family and federal agents on August 21, 1992, is one that kicked off the Constitutional Militia Movement and left America with a deep distrust of its leadership – in particular then-President George H.W. Bush and eventual President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno.

The short version is this: Randy Weaver and his wife Vicki moved with their four kids to the Idaho Panhandle, near the Canadian border, to escape what they thought was an increasingly corrupt world. The Weavers held racial separatist beliefs, but were not involved in any violent activity or rhetoric. They were peaceful Christians who simply wanted to be left alone.

Specifically for his beliefs, Randy Weaver was targeted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in an entrapping “sting” operation designed to gain his cooperation as a snitch. When he refused to become a federal informant, he was charged with illegally selling firearms. Due to a miscommunication about his court date, the Marshal Service was brought in, who laid siege to his house and shot and killed his wife and 14-year-old son.

Randy Weaver was, in many ways, a typical American story. He grew up in an Iowa farming community. He got decent grades in high school and played football. His family attended church regularly. He dropped out of community college and joined the United States Army in 1970. After three years of service, he was honorably discharged.

One month later he married Victoria Jordison. He then enrolled in the University of Northern Iowa, studying criminal justice with an eye toward becoming an FBI Agent. However, he dropped out because the tuition was too expensive. He ended up working in a John Deere plant while his wife worked as a secretary before becoming a homemaker.

Both of the Weavers increasingly became apocalyptic in their view of the world. This, combined with an increasing emphasis on Old Testament-based Christianity, led them to seek a life away from mainstream America, a life of self-reliance. Vicki, in particular, had strong visions of her family surviving the apocalypse through life far away from what they viewed as a corrupt world. To that end, Randy purchased a 20-acre farm in Ruby Ridge, ID, and built a cabin there.

The land was purchased for $5,000 in cash and the trade of the truck they used to move there. Vicki homeschooled the children.

The Weavers Move to Ruby Ridge

After moving to Ruby Ridge, Weaver became acquainted with members of the Aryan Nations in nearby Hayden Lake. He even attended some rallies. The FBI believed his involvement in the church was much deeper than it actually was – they thought he was a regular congregant of the Aryan Nations and had attended the Aryan Nations World Congress.

Both Randy and Vicki were interviewed by the FBI in 1985, with Randy denying membership in the group, citing profound theological differences. Indeed, the Weavers (who had some points of agreement with the Aryan Nations, primarily about the importance of the Old Testament) mostly saw their affiliation with the Aryan Nations as a social outlet. Living off-grid, the nearby members of the Aryan Nations were neighbors in remote northern Idaho.

Later, in 1986, Randy was approached at a rally by undercover ATF informant Kenneth Faderley, who used a biker alter ego of Gus Magisono and was currently monitoring and investigating Weaver’s friend Frank Kumnick. Faderley introduced himself as an illegal firearms dealer from New Jersey. Randy later encountered Faderley at the World Congress of 1987. He skipped the next year’s Congress to run for county sheriff, an election that he lost.

The ATF claims that in 1989, Faderley purchased two illegally shortened shotguns from Randy Weaver. However, Weaver disputes this, saying that the shotguns he sold Faderley were entirely legal and were shortened after the fact. The notes from the case show that Faderley purchased the guns and showed Weaver where to shorten them, which would constitute illegal entrapment. What’s more, the government preyed on the destitute nature of the Weavers, who lived in a small cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water.

The real purpose of the investigation was not to grab Weaver, but to use him to infiltrate a group in Montana being organized by Charles Howarth. In November 1989, Weaver refused to introduce Faderley to Howarth, and Faderley was ordered by his handlers to have no further contact with Weaver.

Randy Weaver Refuses to Turn Snitch

In June 1990, Faderley’s cover was blown. It was then that the ATF reached out to Weaver, stating that they had evidence he was dealing illegal firearms. They told him they would drop all charges if he would agree to become their new informant regarding the investigation of the Aryan Nations groups in the area. Weaver refused.

To coerce him into changing his mind, the Feds staged a stunt where a broken down couple were at the side of the road. Weaver stopped to help them and was handcuffed, thrown face down in the snow and arrested. He had to post his home as bond. Still he refused to become a federal informant.

The irony of the federal government’s desire to obtain informants within the Aryan Nations is that different branches of federal law enforcement and intelligence gathering occupied five of the six key positions in the organization. This means that the Aryan Nations were effectively a government-run shop, with agents spying on each other to ensure the integrity of an investigation – into an organization almost entirely run by the federal government.

The government had an obsession with the Aryan Nations due to Robert Jay Matthews, who was a member of The Order, a terrorist organization including members of the Aryan Nations. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team burned Matthews alive inside his own home.

Due to his ongoing refusal to snitch, Weaver was then arrested in January 1991, on illegal firearms sales charges. These charges stemmed from Weaver’s earlier “sale” of two shortened shotguns to Faderley, the undercover ATF agent – a sale which the feds later admitted constituted illegal entrapment.

Weaver’s court date was set for February 19, 1991, then changed to the next day. Weaver, however, received notice that his court date was not until March 20. He missed his February court appearance and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. The United States Marshals Service wanted to allow Weaver the chance to appear for what he thought was his court date, however, the United States Attorney’s Office sought a grand jury indictment on March 14th – six days before his notice said he was due in court.

Already skeptical of the Feds after their repeated strongarm tactics, both Randy and Vicki saw this as further evidence that Weaver would not receive a fair trial. They increasingly isolated themselves on their Ruby Ridge farm, vowing to fight rather than surrender peacefully.

During the standoff, a voluntary surrender date was negotiated with the Marshals Service for October 1991, but the United States Attorney’s Office refused the settlement. The Deputy Director of the Special Operations Group of the Marshals Service, using evidence obtained through surveillance, believed that the best course of action was to drop the indictment, issue a new one under seal, and use undercover agents to arrest Weaver, who presumably would have dropped his guard. This recommendation was again rejected.

Shooting the Weavers’ Dog: The Siege of Ruby Ridge Begins

On August 21, 1992, six heavily armed, camouflaged U.S. Marshals went to the Weaver property with the purpose of reconnaissance. The Weavers’ dogs gave away the position of the Marshals, alerting their 14-year-old son Sammy and a 24-year-old friend of the family named Kevin Harris, who investigated what the dogs were barking at while armed.

Unsurprisingly, there are several accounts of how the shooting began.

The Weavers claim that the camouflaged Marshals fired first and refused to identify themselves. The Marshals claim that when they rose to identify themselves, they were fired on by Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris. In yet another version of events, Marshals shot the Weavers’ dog Striker as he exposed their position and were fired upon by Sammy in retaliation.

Once the shooting began, Randy Weaver’s son, Sammy, was shot in the back by federal agents immediately after yelling, “I’m coming, dad!” as he ran back to the house. That is to say, he was fleeing the scene, not regrouping for another attack.

After this initial exchange, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team – sometimes disparagingly called the “Hostage Roasting Team,” due to their proclivity to burn down buildings – was called in to assess the situation.

Sniper and observer teams were deployed by the Hostage Rescue Team. A sniper aimed for an instant kill shot on Randy, but Randy moved at the last minute and the shot entered his shoulder, exiting through his armpit. He then fled back to the house from the shed where he had been viewing the body of his dead son.

A second shot missed Kevin Harris and hit Vicki in the head, who was holding their 10-month-old daughter at the time in her arms, a powerful image often invoked in the telling of the story. This same second shot hit Harris after exiting Vicki. An internal investigation found that the second shot was out of policy and that the failure to request surrender was “inexcusable.”

FBI Sniper Lon Horiuchi fired through a door without seeing who was on the other side of it – at people who were fleeing and posed no threat. He was later charged with manslaughter in these deaths, but the charges were dropped. Horiuchi was also involved in the Waco siege, and Timothy McVeigh printed up cards for gun shows encouraging people to target him. Indeed, McVeigh considered targeting Horiuchi and his family rather than the federal building. In 1995, he pleaded the Fifth when questioned about the matter by the United States Senate. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

The rules of engagement were changed on the fly to effectively encourage shooting anyone on sight. This included the remaining Weaver children, who were known to carry weapons 81 percent of the time. Once the siege began, none of the Weavers fired a shot.

The standoff lasted ten days, and involved between 350 and 400 agents who cruelly named their camp, “Camp Vicki.” They would routinely call out “Vicki, we have blueberry pancakes,” but claimed to not know that she was dead. Supporters of the Weavers and opponents of the ATF and FBI formed a vigil.

Weaver’s commanding officer from Vietnam, James “Bo” Gritz (who was currently running for President on the Populist Party ticket) acted as a mediator between the family and government agents. Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey intervened, offering to pay for a robust defense for Weaver if he surrendered. This was what led Weaver to abandon the standoff and surrender himself to federal authorities.

The Aftermath of the Federal Siege at Ruby Ridge

Weaver was charged with ten counts, including the original charges, of illegal firearms sales. His attorney, Gerry Spence, successfully defended Weaver against a host of charges, including murder, by using a self-defense argument. Weaver was ultimately only convicted of the charge of failure to appear, for which he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and a fine of $10,000. He was credited with time served plus three months. Kevin Harris was acquitted of all charges. These were the longest deliberations in Idaho criminal history.

Weaver sued the federal government, which avoided a civil trial by awarding damages of $1,000,000 each to the three surviving Weaver children and $100,000 to Randy. Harris eventually received a settlement of $380,000 after several years of appeals against a government who claimed they would never issue any payment to someone who had killed a federal marshal.

It is worth noting that the federal government took active steps to cover their tracks after the Siege of Ruby Ridge. The chief of the bureau’s Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Section pled guilty to attempting to destroy all copies of the FBI’s internal report on the siege. Federal Judge Edward Lodge penned a lengthy list of misdeeds, including fabrication of evidence and refusing to comply with court orders.

Deval Patrick, then-Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and later Governor of Massachusetts, later found that federal agents had not used excessive force.

One of the biggest changes after the Siege of Ruby Ridge was a change in the rules of engagement. In October 1995, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information ordered all federal agencies to standardize their rules of engagement, particularly as pertained to deadly force. Randy and his daughter Sara wrote a book about the events in 1998 entitled The Federal Siege at Ruby Ridge. The family now live in Kalispell, Montana. Sara became a Born Again Christian in 2012, and forgave the federal agents.

There was, predictably, very little meaningful blowback on the United States Marshals Service or any other parts of the federal government. The Ruby Ridge Task Force delivered a highly redacted 542-page report. And the six marshals involved in the initial shootout were given the highest commendations awarded by the United States Marshal Service.

In 1997, the Justice Department declined to prosecute senior FBI officials for covering up the details of the case. Two FBI agents were prosecuted, one served 18 months in prison for destruction of evidence and the other had the charges dismissed. The second-in-command of the FBI was demoted and three other agents were suspended.

In 1996, Weaver offered his services to defuse tensions between the FBI and the Montana Freeman, however, this offer was declined. In 2000, Weaver visited the former site of the Branch Davidian Church that had been destroyed in another high-profile siege. He later offered support to Edward and Elaine Brown, who were resisting federal taxes at the time.

How It Could Have Gone: John Joe Gray

While it might be easy to take the cynical route and say that Ruby Ridge changed nothing (particularly in the wake of the Waco Siege, which took place a mere year after the Siege of Ruby Ridge), we have at least one example of the federal government admitting that it tread lightly to avoid another Ruby Ridge-like situation.

John Joe Gray is a sovereign citizen living on a 50-acre wooded ranch in Trinidad, Texas. During a traffic stop, he became involved in an altercation with Texas Trooper Jim Cleland. Cleland reached for a .357 in Gray’s car. His car was filled with anti-government literature, including pamphlets referencing bombing a bridge. After the altercation with the Trooper, he was charged with two felonies: taking a police officer’s weapon and assault on a public servant.

Gray promised to have no weapons while he was awaiting trial and posted bond. After the fact, a judge declared that his bond was insufficient. He then ordered Gray arrested. Henderson County Sheriff Ray Nutt stated that “This kook is not worth it. Ten of him is not worth going up there and getting one of my young deputies killed.”

So how long did local, state and federal authorities allow Gray to hole up on his ranch without any kind of armed confrontation? Just a few days shy of 15 years, in what was the longest law enforcement standoff in American history.

The charges were eventually dropped, under the premise that Gray had essentially served a 15-year house arrest term and that a militant confrontation in the style of Ruby Ridge didn’t benefit anyone.

While Randy Weaver’s stand might have made the Feds think twice about coming in guns blazing the next time they can’t strongarm someone – with an eccentric lifestyle and unusual beliefs – into turning informant, this is likely cold comfort for Weaver who lost his 14-year-old son and wife.

This is why those in the freedom, patriot, Constitutional, survival and Second Amendment movements remember this day. It is a chilling reminder of the predatory and aggressive nature of federal law enforcement.

Shouldn’t The Cops Be Leading The Charge Against Mass Shootings?

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              Yesterday we were treated to a spate of reports
covering the arrest of suspected mass shooters in Connecticut, Florida and Ohio.
The incidents were unrelated, but all three suspects were arrested either
because they made digital threats or had tried to purchase mass-shooting
equipment online. What appears to have been the key ingredient in all three
episodes was a heightened awareness of mass shooting possibilities by law
enforcement agencies both at the local, state and digital levels.

              Yesterday I also received an email from a gun-control
advocacy group alerting me to the September 25th hearing on the
national assault weapons ban (H.R. 1296) before the House Judiciary Committee.
The bill has picked up 201 co-sponsors;
it goes without saying that not a single member of the GOP House delegation
appears on the co-sponsor list.

              I’m going to pause my current-day narrative for a
moment and go back in time.  Some may
recall that a wave of arson which destroyed
more than 145 Black churches in the rural South crested during the 1990’s and
then abruptly came to an end. It’s still not clear to what extent these attacks
were coordinated throughout nine Southern states, but we do know how the
problem was ultimately solved.

              In June, 1996 the feds created a National Church Arson
Task Force (NCATF) under the leadership of the ATF.  This was accompanied by the passage of a law,
the Church Arson Prevention Act, which funded a multi-jurisdictional effort
coordinating federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. In two years
this effort, based
on 670 separate investigations, resulted in 308 arrests and 235 convictions, including
the arrest of 119 juveniles.  In the
years which followed, there was almost a complete disappearance of Church
vandalism, both for Black and non-Black houses of worship.

              I am beginning to think that in a less-organized or
formal fashion, the same degree of cooperation and diligence may be at work in
the arrests of these mass-shooting wannabes over the last several days. What is
clearly happening, and it happened in the church burnings back in the 1990’s,
was a similar copy-cat behavior which spread from place to place, from dope to
dope, from messed-up kid to messed-up kid. It can’t be coincidence that the
three young men arrested for possibly planning mass shootings were all in their
early 20’s, were all in some way or another attracted to racialist beliefs,
were all trying to attract attention to themselves through posts on various
social media sites.

              Which brings me to a question that I need to ask my Gun-control
Nation friends: Why do you think that an assault weapons ban that does not
include a buyback will work better than setting up a national task force on mass
shootings like the task force that was created in response to church burnings
all over the South? One of the first things that the NCATF did was to create
and publicize an 800 number which anyone could call with information about a
threat, said information was then routed to the appropriate law enforcement
agency along with follow-up monitoring by the NCATF group itself. Remember the
law enforcement response
to a phone tip about the guy who then murdered and wounded 34 teachers and
students at Stoneman High? There was no response.

              I’m not trying to disparage or in any way undermine the
efforts of dedicated, devoted activists who are trying to promote a national
assault weapons ban. I have made it clear again and again that these
man-killing products are simply not (read: not) sporting or hunting guns. But I
also don’t understand the reluctance of Gun-control Nation to enlist the support
and cooperation of law enforcement agencies who, after all, happen to exist for
the purpose of preventing crimes. And the last time I checked, shooting up a
school or any other public space happens to be a crime.

              As far as I’m concerned, every strategy to reduce or
prevent any kind of criminal gun violence needs the cops to be in charge.