The Branch Davidians were indeed a religious cult. They were not "dangerous" to anyone other than to their own members and that in the sense of allowing themselves and their children to be exploited. Yes, I know there was the incident with David Koresh and the previous leader but that had been dealt with legally. They had not offered violence to anyone in the community and they were not plotting against the nation. The local sheriff and state child protection authorities were able to deal with them peaceably when necessary. The alledged child abuse was the only reason for governmental interferance and that was a state, not a federal responsibility.
What the federal government did in Waco by staging a military raid against citizens was the very definition of governmental abuse of power which the state jury recognized when refusing to convict the surviving Davidians of murder of federal agents. The foreman of that jury said the government was more at fault for what happened there. With all the dissappeared evidence, a federal judge who was not holding the government accountable (remember the lies by federal agents about the use of pyrotechnics and the untruthful and misleading statements in the original warrent) and failed "Congressional" hearings we never got to the truth about Waco. Neither Congress nor the state of Texas held the federal governmnet accountable for its abusive use of power against its citizens and no federal agents ever went to jail for conducting a coverup.
I am more worried about attitudes among citizens that excuses such abuse of governmental power and authority than I am about the existance of religious cults like the Branch Davidians. Now the Islamic "cults" who have vowed jihad against America, have already murdered thousands of Americans and who continue to plot and prepare to use terror against us -- that is conducting war against us and this is a true federal responsibility. Why in heaven the federal government would defend what it did in Waco and then allow this activity to go unchallenged is unexplainable.
If I recall correctly, the federal law that was supposedly broken was about "illegal automatic weapons". I don't recall if there were any found, memory is too full of passwords/commands/etc. (network admin by trade).
They could claim that in this case due to the claim of full auto being fired. That plus the explosives.
That sounds dangerously libertarian of you. This is the same as a Manson cult, were destroying people they kept bringing through and had lots of weapons inside the compound along with fuel. He had people killing themselves rather than just stand up like a man and respond to inquiries about his compound. We know he was mental and he turned others mental and he was NOT OK to leave alone long term.
Despite the bad way he forced it to end, the Feds waited some months before going in. That is a lot of patients for them to do the right thing. They had almost 2000 hours to come out in peace and choose not to. Koresh was molesting people and if anything, the mistake was not going in right away.