Posted on 01/27/2016 5:55:49 AM PST by xzins
Four days after taking the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, LaVoy Finicum, a 55-year-old Arizona rancher told NBC News that he'd rather die than spend his days in prison.
"There are things more important than your life and freedom is one of them," he said in early January as he sat huddled in a blue tarp outside of the wildlife refuge keeping watch with his gun in his lap. "I'm prepared to defend freedom."
Finicum told NBC that night that he was staying outside to ensure that the FBI could find him if they came to arrest him.
Finicum was shot and killed Tuesday night when law enforcement stopped two cars carrying standoff leaders on their way from the refuge to a meeting in Grant County. Ryan Bundy, another militiaman, was shot and transported to the hospital, but did not suffer any life-threatening injuries, according to The Oregonian.
Before Finicum's death was even confirmed, supporters rushed to portray him on social media as a martyr who, according to unverified accounts, had his hands up and was unarmed when he was shot. Law enforcement sources told CNN that Finicum and Ryan Bundy were the only two leaders who did not surrender during the confrontation.
Finicum had taken a strong interest in land disputes with the federal government after he stood at Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's side during his confrontation with the Bureau of Land Management in 2014. After returning home to Arizona, Finicum – a Mormon father with 11 children– made a decision. He was no longer going to write a check to the federal government for his grazing fees.
At the refuge, Finicum became a spokesman for the militiamen, fielding questions from press and helping plan events like one Saturday where ranchers were invited to come to the commandeered refuge to sign "declarations of emancipation" from the federal government, documents asserting they would no longer pay grazing fees. According to the Oregonian, Finicum had incurred about $12,000 in fees with the BLM.
In a video posting just hours before his death, Finicum described why the militiamen were still holding onto the refuge after more than three weeks and after local officials and community members had asked them to go. Finicum said that the occupation was intended to push back on the federal government's overreach.
"They do not want to let go of this," Finicum said. "They do not intend on loosing here and we do not intend on giving it back to them."
But Finicum's participation in the standoff had taken a toll. Back home in Arizona, child services had removed four foster children from his family's care, a move Finicum characterized as retribution. Oregon Public Broadcasting had reported that Finicum made most of his income from fostering.
Before Oregon, Finicum kept a website One Cowboy's Stand For Freedom where he documented his beliefs, his family and his ranch.
Finicum writes on the website that "he has drawn a line in the sand and that line is the Constitution in its original intent."
He also had written a cowboy thriller about the chaos of the American West after an electromagnetic pulse collapses the country's infrastructure called "Only By Blood and Suffering." The novel traced a family as each grown child navigated the new world and fights back against the overreach of the federal government.
Because they like leftists?
I do know that these folks had harmed nobody
And shot them?
bkmk
Confirmed by who?
Maybe...maybe not.
FMCDH(BITS)
The Feds did it to get the leaders out of the picture, and if necessary to show the rest of the group how serious they are. So now there are multiple militia type groups, with a leadership catastrophe, and a man dead. Who takes charge? What do they do?
Instead of the Feds just dropping it, or at least investigating it, or commuting the sentences, or some type of compromise with one of the reasonable leaders who probably aren’t going to be reasonable anymore you cannot predict what is going to happen.
They were armed anarchists. How long would you have tolerated them if they were on property next door to you, but not these nuts, but rather the Black Lives Matter crowd demanding your property as payment for slavery.
Are you referring to these people or to the Occupy movement?
Of course that will be the claim, completely regardless of whatever the truth may be.
At this time, no one on the internet knows squat. Those who say they do, don’t
Read posts by Jeff Head, this thread.
I don’t know the circumstance other than that.
I don’t think it was a Bonnie & Clyde style hit.
Other folks there arrested.
So I don’t know if it was justified or not.
I do note the government hypocrisy though, in the different treatment of those advocating freedom, vs those advocating communism (OWS) or reckless lawlessness (M Brown, Baltimore)
Not bowing down to the almighty government is worthy of being shot by those in power.
Try and get us a heads up on the updates
That’s different. Those are individual citizens > individual citizens. This is individual citizens > GOVERNMENT(The ones supposedly there to protect your rights, my rights, Bundy’s rights). If you had bothered to read up on the issues surrounding the Oregon situation you would know that the Ranchers had served PRISON sentences, came home, and some time later were told to go back to PRISON for another few YEARS for the same charge. The Feds were/are blatantly trying to seize the land. I don’t know how legitimate the claims are about minerals and uranium deposits being located on the land, however those men staging this did not seem unreasonable, raging, violent, or unwilling to accept compromise.
All the Feds had to do if they aren’t at fault is to release all the documents to the public and launch an investigation. Nope. Because there is surely SOMETHING that proves the feds are in the wrong. Otherwise, why not negotiate? No one is being harmed.
The people in the truck were surely recording the entire incident. The FBI/GOV are in the wrong on this one. Dead wrong.
If it is proved that the FBI shot first unprovoked will Oath’s be kept?
Care to share the source?
Or is it an “Wish FR had an edit button” moment?
Because the media was favorable. Occupy were “peaceful protesters”.
These were “militia”.
You can tell whether to like them by the way they are referred.
Consider the source:
Amen to that.
If you put up a tent and assault locals, shoplift, defecate in their streets, and copulate in public, then you are ok.
If you have your shotguns and rifles in a firefighter’s shack, then you are ‘militia’.
Copulaters is good, and rabbit hunters is bad.
Especially for somebody over 70yrs.
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