Steve Stockman, a Republican congressman from Texas, wrote in an article in Guns & Ammo magazine that the Clinton administration had staged the Waco standoff to create popular support for the 1994 assault weapons ban—ignoring the fact that former presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan also supported the ban. Stockman later retracted the claim, but it helped fuel conspiracy theories. (In 2018 Stockman would be sentenced to ten years in federal prison for using $1.2 million in funds from political donors to cover his own personal expenses.) In the Midwest and the western United States, militia
