Twenty years ago, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (accompanied by the media) tried to serve a warrant on the Branch Davidian sect at their compound in Waco, TX. Hilarity ensued, and by "hilarity" I mean 67 men, women, and children perished at the end of a siege. And some ATF ninjas, too, but it's hard to weep many tears for them.
Twenty years. I wonder who those children would be today?
Already a couple of the faithful have sent in checks for a foundation memorial to the innocents who perished at the hands of the ninja at Waco ... I have been criticized by referring to our federal masked men as 'ninja' ... Let us reflect upon the fact that a man who covers his face shows reason to be ashamed of what he is doing. A man who takes it upon himself to shed blood while concealing his identity is a revolting perversion of the warrior ethic. It has long been my conviction that a masked man with a gun is a target. I see no reason to change that view.Tagged under the label fascists because, well, you know.
- Col. Jeff Cooper
Hope you saw this at the Failure To Fire strip this morning.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how the postal worker who ratted them out feels today. Good work, citizen! Your federal job is secured.
ReplyDeleteYou've lost me.
ReplyDeleteHow can a libertarian defend a cult that brainwashes its members, abuses its women and children?
What would those kids be like today? Check out the children of the mormon cult in Bountiful, BC. The girls grew up to be concubines for the leader, the boys were worked like dogs and then faced with a future of celibacy within the cult community or they were run off. They didn't fair so well in the outside world where things like education and social skills matter.
I think you guys seriously need to give your heads a shake on that one.
Glen, without the raid those kids wouldn't be graveyard dead today.
ReplyDeleteAnd there's a whole world of difference between bad choices that individuals make and bad choices that government agents with guns make.
I think that's a libertarian argument. At least, it is in the places I hang out.
Glen- you are absolutely right. Those kids are much better off dead. /sarcasm
ReplyDeleteDon’t blame the postal worker who reported them. He did the right thing. He did what I would hope that you all would do if you saw children being abused by a creepy-ass cult leader. He reported it. He had no way of knowing that the various alphabet soup LEO agencies from the federal government would go full-on paramilitary on them all. He was just trying to help some poor, abused kids. I feel really terrible for the guy – he has to have guilt to the point of incapacitation over the whole thing, and yet it isn’t his fault.
ReplyDeleteThe people to blame are the idiot cult leaders, and also those responsible for creating and maintaining the current mindset of law enforcement, which is to win, at all costs. Never lose. Always escalate. I don’t understand how law enforcement came upon this idea, but you can see it in their actions every day. They are almost always the ones responsible for escalation, and even when they are not, they don’t back away from it once the escalated situation has gone past the reward. They’ll gladly dig in and get into a shooting war in a residential neighborhood over a baggie of pot, instead of backing off and nabbing the guy once the situation has cooled off.
It is an ego thing, I think. They just can’t back down, regroup, and re-plan once it’s been shown that their original plan was ill-advised and tactically stupid. I give you Ruby Ridge for another example. After the first incident, they should have backed off, re-grouped, and came up with another plan. What they did, however, was flood the forest around the compound with ninja, and then acted shocked – SHOCKED, I tell you – when the ninja acted like ninja and the Weaver’s reacted to them violently.
You can’t tell me that the alphabet soup agencies couldn’t have backed off and staked out the compound and tried to open a line of negotiation for as long as it took. What they did was get increasingly insulted and embarrassed over the 67 days, until they couldn’t take it anymore and had to show the world who was in charge. If they’d acted differently, those kids would still be alive today, and would have been raised in foster homes to become adults with lives of their own. Instead, they were incinerated by an angry, vengeful government full of egotists too self-absorbed to swallow their ego and do what was tactically and ethically right.
Goober, don't hide your feelings. Tell us what you really think.
ReplyDelete;-)
Not trying to be a dink, guys. I agree the raid was botched. Hindsight is always 20/20.
ReplyDeleteBUT
You have your rights and freedoms the same as I do. Is it moral and ethical to allow these nutbars to set up states within America that deprive others of those rights?
And let's be honest here: are you prepared to let libertarian principles be twisted to enable slavery? And brainwashing?
Being a libertarian does not excuse you from having to to make moral and ethical value judgements - and sometimes you will have to make them for others that can't do it themselves for one reason or another.
It's food for thought, I think - and it justifies that raid in my opinion.
Being a libertarian means you are responsible for your own actions. This means that an adult who allows themselves to be enslaved or brainwashed of their own free will gets left alone. Who are we to judge what is best for them.
ReplyDeleteBut the kids, that's a different story. Something had to be done about that Waco compound. No reasonable person would argue otherwise.
I am just not entirely convinced that escalation of a violent standoff until the kids got incinerated was really the way to go about helping them.
But let's get real here. The issue was never the safety and security of those kids. it was the open defiance of the government and it's laws for which the folks at Waco were made to answer. the intent was never to save the children. It was to subjugate their parents or kill them all trying.
I believe that David Koresh had an unalienable right to worship as he saw fit. The adults who followed him had the same rights. They set up a business (had a gun store, IIRC), and were minding their own business in their compound. All within their rights.
ReplyDeleteEnter postal worker. He noticed something going on regarding the children in the compound, dragged along with their parents. He spoke up, as any sane and rational adult should have. When Koresh started using/abusing the kids, he forfeited his rights as an adult. Any single person found doing such things anywhere else in Suburbia, 'Merica, would have been dragged before a judge so fast it would have left scorch-marks on the seat of their pants. Why? Because as Goober stated, adults doing that to adults is one thing, adults can stand up and say "no" or leave. Children can't.
Enter the alphabet soup agencies. They stepped in...and then royally mismanaged and mangled the whole shebang. Whether they were trying to overcompensate and come up with a spectacular victory to mask the Ruby Ridge fiasco, or someone forgot to bring their Boy Scout handbook (and the chapter on Storming Fortified Compounds...what, yours didn't have that? Hmm...), the whole thing was a fluster-cluck of the highest magnitude. And was subsequently swept quietly under the rug with the obligatory handful of investigative committees, witch hunts, and yellow-posty-notes of displeasure in service records. Fault was to be had all around, with the exception of the guy who blew the whistle in the first place. He tried. Others fumbled.