He exercised a powerful intellectual and moral control over all his followers and upgraded the weapons he'd used to seize the Mount Carmel compound in 1988 from the previously incumbent faction of Seventh Day Adventists (another group) after a several hours' running gun battle.
Koresh and his "Mighty Men" cadre upgraded his original weapons cache, which featured numbers of Mini-14's, buying and converting numbers of civilian AKS's to full-auto AK-47's illegally, which was the source of the eventual warrants which the ATF tried to serve in 1993 as part of their "ZBO" ("Zee Beeg One", the budget-cycle "convincer" for the incoming 'Rat administration).
He also had a couple of (legal) Barrett rifles, one of which did a lot of the damage during the ATF assault, killing at least one agent and injuring others; the ATF knew about the Barretts and doubtless had plans for them in their ZBO "scary nasty guns" video for the gawping media post-raid. Except that the Davidians actually used them.
If the ATF, spinning forward Old Man Bush's Yankee distaste for crackers with guns, hadn't executed a massive assault on the Davidian compound, if instead the matter had been handled by one (1) Texas Ranger and the sheriff of McClennan County, there'd have been no huge gun battle, no seige, and no dozens of dead; and babies born into the holocaust of Mt. Carmel would be alive today and looking forward to their 23rd birthdays.
Wow. That’s quite a story. Seems like I remember someone saying (much more recently) that the Feds had a chance to deal with him away from the compound.
I thought Waco happened under Clinton/ Janet Reno. Is that incorrect? (Or is that what you meant by Bush’s Yankee distaste ‘spinning forward’?)
You’ve piqued my curiosity now. I’m going to go read up.
It’s really tragic that so many innocent people went down with him.
It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Koresh, himself, though.
People like this always seem to end up surrounded by dead bodies.