I guess they were worried about a sniper rifle. That’s not something that most people have.
Don't be so sure. Many ordinary bolt-action scoped rifles could be considered "sniper" rifles by anti-gunners, and probably soon will be.
Major caliber, like .308 or .30-06?
10x scope?
Match ammo with ballistics chart?
Tens of millions of Americans indeed have "sniper rifles".
DFU, I'm surprised at this response from you. Someone with your political awareness surely realizes ‘sniper rifle’ is MSM and JBT speak for any gun with a scope. And in Colorado that is something many people would have.
It may turn out that these guys had some serious hardware and were up to no good, but the media has zero credibility when it comes to using the following terms: sniper rifle, assault weapon, assault rifle, assault pistol, assault ‘anything,’ machine gun, automatic rifle, arsenal, cache, armory, compound, militia, casing, bullet, cartridge, clip, magazine, thousands of rounds of ammunition, etc.
If you just generally assume the “journalist” is an idiot trying to use scary words of which he/she doesn't know the meaning to describe an innocuous situation you'll be right way more often than not. The truly newsworthy stories will stick around long enough to learn the details. If they don't it probably menas there was no 'there' there.