Oh, just like you to want to abort a whole wildlife refuge.
Image … must be removed from mind …
I don’t think its a minor point that the people actually involved with this issue don’t want the militia here. These people are itching for a fight and using our state as a battleground for it. On top of that, it seems like the real issue here is the minimum sentence is completely out of whack for what the crime is… for the Hammonds. I wonder if we polled the militia how many of them were for forced minimums… until they realized it would affect one of theirs.
This sounds like it is straight out of a movie with some redneck getting drunk, lighting shit on fire, getting arrested and then his redneck family raiding the sheriff’s office to bust him out of jail. Ok i kid, i kid, but it does kind of sound like that plot line.
As far as talking about the response, compare what these idiots are doing to what other protests (such as Black Lives Matter or random Baltimore riots) have done. I don’t see any violence, property damage, looting or threats. They also aren’t having any economic impact. You might say these guys are looking for a fight, but guess what, so were the other protesters.
So i say let idiots go take over remote federal buildings that nobody cares about as long as they don’t do any harm. It is very polite of them not to bother anyone else when they are protesting. Eventually they will run out of S’more-flavored Schnapps and go home.
I don’t get these excuses. These guys came here from out of state looking for a fight to help people who don’t want their help. Why should we just brush that aside and say let the boys be boys. It’s an armed militia occupying a federal building. That’s not a minor who cares problem.
I agree. The precedent of letting armed thugs take over property that isn’t theirs is one we really don’t want.
Wait them out, arrest them all, try them, and, if they’re convicted, send them to jail.
Also, I agree with one point these yahoos are making – a five year minimum sentence for minor arson is whack.
I think arson is one of things we really want to discourage. It’s often uncontrollable and the outcome (minor/major) is beyond the perp’s control. Here, my recollection is it cost nearly a million dollars to put out that blaze. Not so minor and probably more than a few firefighters put at risk.
It’s more than that. Anyone living in the Northwest is probably painfully aware that Alaska, Oregon, Washington, to name just some of them, have had very serious forest fires that killed, destroyed towns. We lose firefighters all the time to fighting forest fires. We had seven weeks of smoke this last summer, the air really unhealthy. I remember when it rained ash here too.
I’m not sure they shouldn’t be punished, but I do question five years of prison. They were using the tools they had trying to save their land and the feed their cattle eat… aka their livelihood. This is why i prefer human components in sentencing. What they did could have turned into a tens of thousands of acres of forested land the teams have trouble getting to and risk their lives fighting… but I don’t know that a mistake should be five years when violent criminals can get less than that.
The “federal building” is a remote wilderness outpost that doesn’t matter to anyone. That’s why it’s not worth directly antagonizing them.
This is the “federal building” we are talking about:
Let’s imagine you decide to storm the building and try to arrest everyone. What’s the BEST case scenario you imagine? I would suggest that if everything went perfectly, with no violence at all, you will essentially gain nothing and no citizen will actually benefit from the action.
Whereas, the worst case, you have a bunch of dead folks on both sides, and fan the flames of the nutjobs.
Likewise, consider the best and worst case scenarios if you just wait.
Worst case, they sit there in sub freezing weather, affecting NO ONE because there is basically nothing going on at the refuge in January anyway.
Best case, they go home and no one is harmed, and you deflate the claims that the federal government is somehow oppressing them.
Man they should have taken over an arby’s or something.
You know what. This is my state, and it matters to me. We have lots of old, small buildings that I don’t want armed thugs taking over because they think they’re more special than the rest of us. You don’t have to show me the building Timex. I can drive there in a matter of hours. I know the area. So why don’t you continue to tell me me more about what’s going on here.
I think you guys are talking past each other. This is what happens when you try to generalize a response from a Murbella post. (Sorry, dude.)
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/01/04/3735745/move-vs-oregon-standoff/
And 30 years ago, a similar standoff between police and a black anti-government group in Philadelphia played out very differently. Armed members of a fringe liberation group called MOVE were bombed and burned alive for directing their weapons at police. The bombing highlighted the stark contrast in the way cops treat black and white radicals.
In the end, one woman and one child made it out of the house alive. Five children and six adults were killed.
I don’t want equal application of violence in this case. I want the media to fully own this and represent this equally.
My understanding is that they were convicted of having set the fires to cover up deer poaching. Their defense was that they did it as an unsanctioned firebreak, but that was obviously in dispute.
Again, you are overplaying your hand and making a nonsensical comparison.
If you want to try to make a comparison between MOVE and another group, the obvious choice would be the cult at Waco… And the government pretty much handled it just as poorly, despite them being white.
But I guess that doesn’t work as well to support the ridiculous claim that race is playing some role in the current situation.
And again, I’m not sure why it’s so hard for you to grasp the major difference between this case and situations that take place in downtown metropolitan areas. In a freaking city, other innocent civilians are involved. In the case in Oregon, it’s not near ANYTHING. There is absolutely no incentive to escalate it.
Finally, the comparison to police action from over three decades ago is absurd on its face. Oh, you mean modern police methods are different then ages ago? No shit.
Because something that you “can drive to in a matter of hours” isn’t actually happening near you. Things that are hundreds of miles away aren’t where you are.
And that is why it’s nonsensical to let some misplaced sense of vengeance drive you to actually CALL FOR police overreaction.
This whole freaking thread is about police overreaction, and now you want exactly that? For what? To make things even? It won’t.
Nothing bad comes from waiting it out at this point. It’s idiotic to actually want the police to escalate the situation for no reason at all.
It’s not vengeance. Not that you’ll listen, but Oregon is not a stranger to issues with Federal restriction and conflict. We’ve had it with loggers and the national forest. Farmers and water rights when we’re in a drought and they want to save fish (just research the Klamath Basic). We’ve had issues with licensing and mushroom hunting, and what do you know… issues with ranchers. It’s not new. This kind of conflict is not new here in this, especially in Southern or Eastern Oregon. What is new… armed assholes coming from outside the state wanting to take their fight with the federal government here.
So you don’t have to believe I know anything about national forests, not with loggers in my family or the fact I used to ride horses as a kid through the orchards here, or that i go mushroom hunting in the national forests or that I am very familiar with water rights having been on a regulation irrigation ditch water source, complete with water rights… sort of for years, but I will still say it. Conflict with the Federal government and these national forests is not new in Oregon. Having a bunch of outsiders pretend like they know what is going on and show up with guns… is. And that building you don’t care about, we have a lot of small buildings here, ranger stations and other buildings, some historical, that are federal buildings. It’s very sad when we lose an old one to a forest fire too. Some of them have been there for over a hundred years.
And at no point did i say storm the place, but I will not let you excuse their behavior in silence.
Again, you don’t seem to be willing to consider the issue from a purely pragmatic perspective. Just do the math in your head, and lay out what you think the best and worst case scenarios are for the different courses of action.
Let’s imagine that the feds go in there and create some huge fiasco like Waco. Do you think that is going to REDUCE the number of crazy militia nuts? Cause I promise you it will not.
Some more info about this for folks interested.
They are “occupying” empty administrative buildings. Empty. Because no one would currently be working on the site at this time of year. And they are 30 miles away from the nearest town. There is nothing there.
Also, this part made me laugh:
As the temperature dropped below freezing Saturday night in the high desert outside the stone cottage that is the refuge’s headquarters, the occupiers set up a small fire to stay warm, but the snow saturated sagebrush would not stay lit. Other local ranchers periodically drove up, looked and then drove away.
One final thing though, I’m in no way excusing their behavior at all. They are a bunch of imbeciles. Hell, a bunch of then have been shown to be the same racist nutjobs who want to ban Islam.
But escalating the case will accomplish nothing at this point.
Again, I never said they should go in. So you tell me who you’re talking to when you say that. What these people are doing is illegal and not wanted by the community. And whether like it or not , I am part of that community. I don’t live in Burns, OR. But as many people will tell you, there’s Eugene through Portland and then the rest of the state. The rest of the state has a lot of rural industry, like the historic mill that just burned down here and the ranchers that lived across from the street from me, and the orchards i got to ride through when I was young, and the logging community my actual family’s a part of.
Bundy and his thugs should have never come to this state to begin with. It’s 19 degrees here and Burn’s a higher elevation. Southern and Eastern Oregon can get pretty cold, that far east in the state, damn cold. The only reason I’m not in that community is there is actually a mountain range between where I live and this part of the state but Bend, OR is frequented by this area and it’s 2hours away from Burns and is still part of our area.
So again, these people should not be there. They should have never come here, and they should be charged when they’re able to charge these people safely. And let’s get one thing straight here, The Hammonds are not unarmed black men being gunned down by armed police men. The Bundys armed militia members itching for a fight. the situations are not remotely the same. Don’t try and compare this to police brutality and questionable use of force. Bundy and his thugs created this mess in the hopes of having a mess on hand. The Burns community and the Hammonds don’t want them here. The militia has it’s own violent agenda.