You’re being willfully ignorant. If someone who was armed to the teeth followed you home and parked outside your house, how would you react? If same people actively followed your family members as they went about their daily lives, would you not classify that as terrorism?
[Oregon Live article from January 11.](Oregon Live article from January 11.)
Bolding mine.
all this are they terrorists is bullshit. I’ll bet anyone where 2 for 1 they will not be charged as terrorists. So game over. Anyone want to take me on that?
Whether or not they will be ultimately tried as terrorists is besides the point. They used intimidation tactics before their occupation. If that doesn’t qualify as terrorism for you, so be it. It does to me, and from what I can gather, a lot of other people.
That doesn’t mean anything. The Unabomber wasn’t charged with terrorism either.
Turns out that shoe bomber guy wasn’t a terrorist after all!
But, in all honesty, I don’t see a way to call these guys terrorists without also calling, say, students occupying a campus administration building terrorists.
It depends what you mean by “occupying.” If it’s a sit-in, I’m quite comfortable calling them non-terrorists. If they forcibly eject everyone from the building, the line is less clear.
Most student protesters aren’t heavily armed and threatening to kill law officers if they come to evict them.
Yep. For me, Civil disobedience = unarmed, maybe chaining themselves to items to prevent removal but no threatening of violence. One of the key hallmarks of civil disobedience is the willingness to accept consequences for breaking the law. Gandhi was arrested; MLK was arrested.
These people were definitely criminals largely due to the fact of them being armed and threatening violence to prevent being arrested. For me, this is terrorism since they’ve gone beyond that and have threatened the lives of federal and state employees. I’m not going to credit them for not having killed anyone because law enforcement was smart enough not to go in there to arrest them. If they had done so, I have little doubt that it would have been a bloodbath. “Do as I say or I will kill you” is NOT civil disobedience.
These guys weren’t merely protesting to right a wrong or draw attention to their cause. They were trying to foment a rebellion, and their strategy was to provoke an armed confrontation in which law officers would be killed for trying to do their duty.
From Merriam-Webster:
I think the only quibble would be whether the threat and avowed intention to engage in terroristic acts actually constitutes terrorism. These guys were certainly terrorist wannabes.
Did any one of them ever actually fire a weapon? They seemed like a bunch of declawed roosters, squawking a lot to no real effect. It has been mightily entertaining and not much else. The best way to put down this “movement”, IMO, would be to award them a Coscar for best staged LARP of the year (so far).
“Terrorism” isn’t exactly the name of a crime, at least not in the USA. You aren’t charged with Terrorism, you’re charged with specific acts.
Actually, terrorism is the name of several crimes both at the federal and state levels.
If its legal to have a gun, and it’s legal to have a sit-in, seems to me it should be legal to have a gun at a sit-in. And while I don’t want to soft-sell the “threatening cops” thing, that still falls pretty well below my threshold for “terrorism.”
Well, it’s legal to get drunk, and it’s legal to drive, but the authorities tend to frown upon driving while drunk…
Its probably not legal to have a sit in. The point of civil disobedience is that you are breaking the law and forcing the government to action. Or the private organization. That will cause the public and the government to evaluate the situation you are protesting.
And I believe the federal government has the right to restrict gun possession on their own property. You cannot bring a gun into any government building I know of without breaking the law.
So I suspect that in both these cases, it was not legal to have guns where they had guns, nor was it legal to occupy property when they occupied it.
No, it’s not legal to have a sit-in in many circumstances, which is the whole point of a sit-in. Civil disobedience is deliberate disobedience to the law. The refuge was closed, so they were trespassing, not to mention property damage, theft of vehicles, and no doubt other activities that were probably criminal mischief.
They weren’t merely threatening cops, they were advocating and planning to kill cops as a way to intimidate the government into giving in to their political demands.
Pacific Patriots Network has posted a call to action. They are asking supporters to come to Burns to protests the presence of the FBI and to have the county sheriff indicted for allowing the FBI to murder Finicum. And, of course, there is a typo in the rsvp e-mail address.
The site has no names or other information on it. This could just be one drooling wacko posting slobber, FAWCT.
One cheers the martyrdom of that brave member of Vanilla ISIS, and mourns the failure of our Brave Defenders of the Constitooshun to establish their Cowlipate in Oregon.
They can’t even get the proper targets of their ire correct. They condemn the county sheriff and FBI, but it was state troopers who actually shot him.
I see a problem with this plan…
Negotiations are going well. :rolleyes: The remaining militants have now upped their demands to a full pardon for everyone involved. I’m not sure these guys understand the meanings of words like “negotiations” and “leverage.”