…Some have said he his lost balance. I don’t know. All I can say is that I find it very hard to criticize the men at the roadblock. And yes, Finicum was armed. He carried a concealed pistol on his left side. And he had several more weapons in the automobile. The weapons on Finicum and in the auto are not, per se, illegal but context is everything. In the context of the general temper of the standoff and of Linicum’s own statements, assuming that he had made the decision to go out shooting is not all that unreasonable.
I generally agree with the description given by the FBI supervisor at the scene:
“Finicum leaves the truck and steps through the snow,” Bretzing said. “Agents and troopers on scene had information that Finicum and others would be armed. On at least two occasions, Finicum reaches his right hand toward a pocket on the left inside portion of his jacket. He did have a loaded 9 mm semi-automatic handgun in that pocket. At this time, OSP troopers shot Finicum.”
I am generally sympathetic to the struggle of ranchers in the American West and Southwest in their struggle with the federal government. As I’ve said before, if you live in the eastern two-thirds of the United States, your impression of federal land ownership is largely battlefields and forests. Out West, the story is different:
Nothing happens in a vacuum [this was Dean Koontz’s point] and it is no coincidence that the increasingly high stakes standoffs between landowners and federal agents are rooted, in great part, in the overweening arrogance and petty tyranny exhibited by the agencies that “manage” America’s public lands.
In addition to bad policy, the BLM has attracted managers who look upon the federal lands as their personal fiefdoms to do with as they see fit. BLM managers have used the Endangered Species Act as a cudgel to curtail or forbid off road recreational activity and ranching is large areas. In 2004, the BLM aggressively pushed to have law enforcement authority on highways that passed through federally owned land rather than having that function performed by state and county police. This would not only have wildly increased the power of the BLM but it would have created a new revenue stream for them—fines from traffic violations.
General sympathy for ranchers who are being crushed by federal agencies, though, doesn’t translate into support for every knuckle-headed thing some of these people, specifically the Bundy clan, do….