I’ll be curious how Bag of Dicks v. Bureau of Land Management plays out, now that Scalia is dead.
“Without the guns, they would have come out in a paddy wagon and put us in zip-tie handcuffs,” Bundy said of authorities. “We would never have been able to tell people why we were there.”
Queue civil rights protestors for the face palm.
Now I want to know how all the Law & Order Nixon Republicans would react if this was BLM was saying this, they didn’t react well to the Black Panthers.
Bye bye Bundy,
Well, of course you needed guns because as you just admitted, the police would have come out and arrested you peacefully. Those Black Lives Matter people need to hear your message. Except they would probably be droned with Hellfire rockets.
And your message was just one of those “Hold my beer and watch this.” moments? No organization, no planning, no intent to interfere, says the defendant. His lack of regret for the death of a gang member and the site destruction will combine with his past record of disregarding court orders. The Judge can easily conclude that Bundy is a menace to society when the sentencing rolls around. And don’t forget the firearms enhancements.
When it comes right down to it there is only one Miranda right: the right to remain silent. Bundy is so full of himself that he will not use that right.
And if you were black, they’d have shot you dead, dragged you out, claimed they were justified, and walked away with no consequences.
Cue, not Queue.
“Peaceful” and “Armed” are mutually exclusive. Bringing a gun into any situation is itself a demonstration of one’s intent to use it. Otherwise, the person carrying wouldn’t have brought a gun in the first place.
“Western states must win more control over vast federal land holdings.”
And the way to do that “constitutionally” is through the courts and Congress, not by an armed takeover. These “patriots” thumbed their noses at the Constitution and everything it stands for.
Bundy’s message is simple. “All the land that I can see from my SUV belongs to me. I lay claim to it. And I intend to sell the drilling rights, the lumber rights, the mineral rights, and/or the grazing rights to the highest bidders. And then I will be so f*cking rich, I’ll be able to afford a real winter coat.”
He’s right, you know, whether you want to admit it or not. You need force of some sort, or a hostage, or some sort of leverage in order to get what you want by committing a crime publicly, or else the authorities will try to and probably succeed in stopping you and putting you under arrest. I can’t argue with Ammon on this one.
And was trashing the offices and destroying artifacts part of getting the message out?
The price we pay for freedom is that sometimes it morphs into freeee-dumb.
Fair enough. Now you need to be in prison to send an equally important message.
“Cue, not Queue.”
Point taken.
““Peaceful” and “Armed” are mutually exclusive. Bringing a gun into any situation is itself a demonstration of one’s intent to use it. Otherwise, the person carrying wouldn’t have brought a gun in the first place.”
I was being sarcastic. Obviously peaceful protests without guns have both garnered enormous attention and unprecedented success. Thought that would be kinda of assumed around here. 
Give the land back to the people, and how long before it’s a private golf club and an exclusive resort? The Bundy’s don’t give a shit about “the people”. They just want the land for themselves so they can exploit it.
The belief that you need to be armed in order to get people to listen to you speaks more to your lack of confidence in the power of your message than it does to anything else.
Society has remembered better the messages of those who eschewed arms because they believed in the implicit power of their messages (e.g.: Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela) than those who believed they needed to be armed to get people to listen to them (e.g.: Kubla Khan, Hitler, Idi Amin, ISIS, Black Panthers).
If you want your message to be obscured, if not buried (figuratively and perhaps literally), carry arms.
Well, seeing how they were calling for running people over in Charlotte…
I think you have your answer.
He’s making the same kind of argument that Pence made in the Syrian refugee case (where three conservative judges all trashed Pence). Claiming that you have no intent to interfere with someone is kinda just a little bit contradicted if the act that you’re committing has interference as one of its key elements.
“Your honor, I had no intent to rob that bank, I just wanted to address the enormous economic inequality of this country by distributing money to underserved elements of society. And if I hadn’t used a gun I couldn’t have gotten my message out.”