Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Late last week, while protestors were still trying to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on land adjacent to a native reservation; seven people who took up arms against the federal government’s unjust practices in the Western United States were all acquitted of conspiracy charges by a jury of their peers – much to the chagrin of federal officials.
Ammon Bundy reportedly spent ten hours across three days testifying as to why he and the other five men and one woman decided to bring guns and take over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for several weeks last winter.
“’I want to be clear,’ he said. ‘I proposed to them we go into the refuge and basically take possession of it and take these lands back to the people,’” wrote Patrik Jonsson in his piece for the Christian Science Monitor.
His testimony centered upon the struggle over land use in the Mountain West region of the US, and apparently swayed the 12 jurors into an acquittal. A juror later wrote that the federal prosecutors simply failed to demonstrate the fact the presence of firearms automatically meant some deeper anti-government conspiracy was at work. In fact, Bundy explained the presence of the guns.
“Bundy told jurors that occupiers armed themselves so they wouldn’t be immediately arrested, and also so they could fire back if the government attacked them,” Jonsson wrote.
Naturally, for their part, the feds are apoplectic. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said she was disappointed in the verdict and urged federal employees to be cautious of “patriot groups;” because, obviously this verdict is the signal they’ve been waiting for to launch Civil War II. Make no mistake, the Second Amendment’s existence, to this day, remains one of the things that keep our federal overlords up at night; other than cocaine and hookers. This is partly why the Department of Homeland Security has, over the years, purchased enough ammunition to shoot every man, woman and child in the USA about five times apiece.
One of the attorneys for the defense had a less-sinister explanation for the verdict.
“Matthew Schindler, the attorney for one of the charged occupiers, says overconfident prosecutors rushed a flawed case through. ‘When all you do is shoot fish in a barrel you come to think you’re a great fisherman, and you’re not,’ he told BuzzFeed,” wrote Jonsson.
Of course, as interesting as this story is in and of itself, its entertainment value skyrockets when one heads over to social media, namely Facebook, and takes the Internet’s temperature on the issue – presently it’s white-hot hopping-mad. Many are echoing Jewell’s alarmist nonsense, predicting some sort of armed insurgency to come boiling out of America’s backwoods – and ostensibly very fearful their most worshipful state won’t be able to protect them from people they like to deride as inbred dumbshit Trump supporters. Odd, that. The inevitable comparisons between the Bundys and the Standing Rock protestors have also begun, and beyond just social media.
Also last Thursday in the CSM, Zhai Yun Tan wrote a piece comparing the relative treatment of the Bundys and the natives.
“’I’m struggling as an attorney to see an equitable system when you have armed criminals … who have seized public property for months (acquitted of their charges),” says Anthony Broadman, an attorney who represents tribal governments in public affairs, in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor. ‘On the other hand I wake up and see pictures of dogs with bloody mouths and state-sponsored suppression of peaceful, unarmed environmental protests. As an attorney, it is really troubling to not see a double standard.,” reads a portion of the CSM article.
As an adult, I’m not sure why other adults cannot see the rather glaring differences here. First, the Dakota Access Protests were NOT peaceful at all last week when a protestor fired three rounds from a .38 Special handgun at cops and four pieces of construction equipment were set ablaze. Shots fired at police by the Bundys during the entire siege of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge totaled exactly zero. And, nothing was set ablaze.
Of course, the differences between the two complaints, that of the Bundys and those of the natives, are also vastly different. The Bundys were arguing that unused federal land (the federal government owns almost half the land of the American West) should be made available for ranchers to graze their cattle upon and for people to otherwise make use of. The natives are trying to prevent the rightful owners of private property from using their land as they see fit by making a series of nonsensical arguments about “water pollution” and “sacred burial sites.” And they’re making said nonsensical arguments upon said private property and are refusing to leave when ordered to by the rightful owners of that property. That the government is “helping” remove them is only fitting – this is a rare instance of the government actually performing the one function humankind made the mistake of inventing government to do to begin with – protect the private property of citizens from attack.
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