Waco and Ruby Ridge are the outcome of infringements of the right to keep and bear arms, not "bad decisions".
People who understand the Constitution and the Second Amendment understand when the boot of the tyrant is on their neck. They can sense that the perpetrators of injustice will see to it that they are punished for opposing the tyranny. Both Weaver and Koresh knew that surrender would be followed by lies. The lies told in the aftermath of these brutal outrages prove them right.
I tire of hearing that free people must wait for "due process" when the Second Amendment is clearly being infringed.
Why should I have to submit to a day in court because Kalifornia has decided that I may not own a rifle with a pistol grip? I can feel the foot of the tyrant on my neck.
I think you misunderstand my point. I was agreeing with one_particular_harbour's point that Waco and Ruby Ridge were not the result of conspiracies, but were the understandable outcome of bureaucratic organizations operating in an incompetent and hamhanded fashion.
Check out this recent post:
Twin Titanics: The FBI and CIA are first of all bureaucracies
(I hope this works--I'm in way over my head with this HTML stuff).
The above post summarizes what I was trying to say--the FBI, CIA, and Fed Govt. in general is too damned big and powerful to operate correctly, that is, in the interest of the citizenry. Therefore we get Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc. And both o_p_h and I acknowledge that Reno, Clinton, et. al. were and are really bad folks who used these organizations for their own ends.
I'd wager the BATF and FBI agents didn't do the things they did in order to subvert the 2nd Amendment. They were operating in their own bureaucratic environment in response to the incentives of their particular organizations. And yeah, a part of it was Reno, etc. manipulating events for their own ends. But it wasn't a vast conspiracy.
What happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge shouldn't have happened and the perpetrators should be brought to justice. It won't happen. Again, a consequence of too much government which is what the Constitution was supposed to protect us from. Large parts of the Constitution and Bill of Rights have been disregarded by the Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary over the years as it suited them at the time. So we end up with an all-powerful out-of-control government monster that stomps on those who get in the way. These events are the culmination of a long string of errors and crimes against the Constitution. It isn't simply a 2A matter.
I'm as big a supporter of the 2nd Amendment as you are. I own firearms of different types and calibers, which I won't detail here. I'm in the market for a scattergun at the moment.