Did anyone else watch “Waco” on the Paramount Network? I recorded the series but have only now started watching it. I’m into the third episode and the ATF has launched their initial assault… and *MAN* the ATF does NOT come off well. The Branch Davidians? Yeppers, crackpot cultists. But the ATF is being depicted basically as a pack of blood-thirsty gloryhounds.

The series starts off with the disastrous and equally stupid raid on Randy Weavers home in Ruby Ridge. That event, coming during the GHW Bush administration and basically approved of and made worse by the Clinton administration, is I think one of the foundational events that led to the current political climate. The Weavers and the Davidians were whackos to be sure… but they were in any rational measure essentially harmless. But the FBI and ATF went after them with a level of force that was wholly unwarranted. Those events led to the the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1990’s militia movement and pretty much the complete collapse in faith in the US government by a great many people who otherwise thought of themselves as patriots. Prior to these events, militia types were a *very* fringe element; after these events they went kinda mainstream. Would we have  President Trump today if Randy Weaver had been simply arrested away from his house? If David Koresh had been picked up when he went into town to get some groceries? Would we have the 3-Percenters and Oath Keepers and the like if the government hadn’t actually acted like an organization that people might actually need top worry about? Similarly, I wonder where we’d be today with “ghost guns” and 3D printed firearms, as well as school shootings carried out by lil’ whackjobs obsessed with guns, if the government hadn’t banned modern sporting rifles and standard capacity magazines back in the 90’s, and hadn’t kept threatening to ban them again.

It doesn’t help that prior to the 1980’s or so, a “cop” would look like this:

And seemingly around about the late 80’s, early 90’s, far too often police started looking like this;

And this:

When SWAT teams were first formed in the late 1960’/early 1970’s, their purpose was pretty specific: combating terrorists and heavily armed bank robbers and the like. At the time that was an important function; urban crime and terrorism were on the rise in the 60’s and 70’s. But then SWAT was turned loose on The War On Some Drugs. And then after the crime peak of the 1990’s, SWAT didn’t go away: SWAT teams were used on lesser and lesser criminals, sometimes storming homes on the rumor that someone in there might have a few ounces of weed, for Grud’s sake.

So you’ve got an increasingly militarized police force – ATF, FBI, even the local PD – that has been caught on camera using military tools, weapons and force on American citizens… and we’re supposed to be surprised that some people have concluded that it might be a good idea to gun-up against the day the government turns full-blown fascist?

When i see stuff like this, I have two basic responses:

1: You ask “what does a civilian need with an AR-15,” and I’ll just point to armor-plated cops with automatic weapons. If *they* aren’t safe on the streets without such weapons, why should I feel safe without my own personal General Electric minigun?

2: That’s not a hair question.