Mr Khan said:
badgenome said:
pokoko said:
The guns could have turned it into something worse. The exposure is what saved the day.
However, I'm not sure I understand this. He's using land he doesn't own in order to make money but refuses to pay anything? While others do pay? I see no reason why I should be on this guy's side. |
He doesn't own it, but his family has used it for 120 some-odd years and he had a permit until 1993, when the feds began deliberately running ranchers off the land using constant fee increases and claims of environmental concerns. In Bundy's case, the feds expressed concerned about tortoises and capped his herd at 150 head, to which Bundy responded by ceasing to pay the fee.
At the heart of the problem is the feds claiming land inside of established states, which is a flagrant violation of state sovereignty. I mean, it is kind of an absurdity that they claim ownership over 85% of Nevada.
Anyway, it's the kind of thing that the feds could easily have won in the court of public opinion if they had just portrayed him as a deadbeat and took a softly, softly approach. But thugs gonna thug.
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This i have to agree with. Overreach is a problem, and now they have a PR nightmare where the militia wingnuts look like they're in the right of things, when really it was about a deadbeat refusing to pay for use of land that he doesn't own. Frame it as a property thing from the government's side and you'd have the left-wing protestors out instead 
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ehhh... not really. It's more, the BLM refused to let him pay. He refused to pay because they said he could only have 150 cattle graze on those lands. Which, you can't be a rancher with so few cattle.
So he would of been breaking the law either way, whether he paid the fee for the 1/10th of the cattle they'd take or not. So why pay.
It's really more a story of the BLM trying to drive out cattle owners so they could sell the land to home developers under the claim of enviromental protection.
It's sort of like one of those times in the comics where It's Magneto vs The Redskull.
Sure Magneto sucks... but he's no Nazi.
