There is definitely a huge portion of the federal land bureaucracy that feels perfect land management means not letting anybody use public land. Look no further than the closing of OHV trails, mining claims, and this grazing issue. Having somebody that doesn't pay grazing fees for 20 years, and loses his cattle in court, decide to pull guns on people with a court order doesn't help that fight.
This guy that got killed last night should have spent the latter years of his life riding his horse and playing with his grandkids. Instead he followed the Bundy brothers to some kind of standoff where the Feds mean it when they say "drop your weapon."
Exactly which agency shot the deceased hasn't been identified. I did notice that the investigating agency is the Deschutes County Sheriff's Department which makes me wonder if it was a federal agent or a state/local.
No winners in this one. Just varied degrees of losers.
” Having somebody that doesn’t pay grazing fees for 20 years, and loses his cattle in court, decide to pull guns on people with a court order doesn’t help that fight. “
I think this gets lost in the discussion.
“No winners in this one. Just varied degrees of losers.”
Agree
Yes, the played right into the feds hands. They should have gone unarmed and let every reporter in the world know they were unarmed. And naming themselves Occupy Wall Street West would have helped.
Sadly, I agree. When the issues (of Federal land grabs, the exclusion of citizens from the resources that are, by law, supposed to be available, and the interference with travel, especially in mixed owner acreage for the purpose of denying usage of private property so the Government can take the land or obtain it cheaply under duress) had been exposed and made part of the discussion, the immediate objective had been attained: Awareness.
The next step enabled the accumulation of data from others who had similar problems.
If that was done, I sincerely hope that information was transmitted off site and successfully mirrored and archived in a host of locations. It could have been submitted equally well via e-mail or other means.
At that point, what is left?
Armed conflict?
Neither the test case nor the time for it.
Push it in the court of public opinion and pull out more cases like it, to show this is not an isolated situation but endemic abuse.
A shootout? Nope. Bad deal.
The media will allow no martyrs for a cause, but will instead do what has been done by the media at Ruby Ridge, in Philadelphia, Waco, Medina, and possibly Waco again.
Any appearance of having been anything but WRONGED by the Feds loses support, and the worse the act(s) which are not in line with the rules, the less support there will be for the (any) cause.
Demonization (Alinsky tactic) of the parties wronged in these situations is the first step in the media by official agencies.
You have to be more of a saint than that--preferably beyond reproach.
You can protest the fees, but pay them. You lose the moral high ground when you can be portrayed as a hooligan and scofflaw rather than a citizen with a legitimate grievance.
The founders worked their way up to armed conflict (even the snowball fight that became the Boston Massacre), but they built their case with those who would listen, and did so strongly, exhausting peaceful means, in writing, and conducting occasional protests along the way.
That glorious unanimous Declaration in 1776 was far from the first step--it was the final one, after repeatedly trying all legal means to prevail in their grievances.
This situation went to a level it should not have--whether justified or not, despite the validity of the cause, because the objectives had been achieved, unless the objective was armed conflict.
We will likely never know what the discussion was going to be with the Sheriff, whether the Feds would have let the people up there just leave (At $100,000/day, they sure had all that geewhiz cop equipment out and they had to be able to put heads on pikes to justify that), or if there was going to be a pitched battle.
There is still a significant part of America that simply doesn't get the issue, does not understand or know about the wrong being done in America's name, or just doesn't care.
Without garnering massive support before any standoff, the issue is doomed to the abyss.
Hopefully, that doesn't happen here.
We would know who shot the rancher, if the rancher was a black youth in the urban jungle.