Right-Wing Militia Fanatic/Analysis

Technically, the Ruby Ridge, Waco and Oklahoma City incidents did not involve actual militias per se, though the movement's rallying around these events, as well as the political views of some of the people involved, created a lot of confusion in the matter. This page is to clear up the misconceptions about what had happened.

The main people involved in the Ruby Ridge were a family of survivalists led by one Randy Weaver, a former Green Beret and factory worker who, in 1983, moved with his family to a cabin in isolated Boundary County in northern Idaho in order to escape from what they saw as the corruption of the modern world. Here, he got involved in an assortment of far-right causes, including the "sovereign citizen" and tax protest movements, and started refusing to pay his taxes. His wife Vicki, meanwhile, sent threatening letters to then-President Ronald Reagan and the IRS, addressed to the "Queen of Babylon". After he sold a pair of illegal sawed off shotguns to an undercover ATF agent, a clerical error in the letter telling him when he was to arrive in court (the letter said his trial was to begin on March 20, 1991, but actually, it was to begin on February 20) led to him becoming a wanted fugitive by accident. Mistaking government incompetence for proof that they were out to get him, he hunkered down with his family for over a year, leading to a siege that lasted from August 21-30, 1992 and resulted in the death of Weaver's wife Vicki, his son Samuel, and a US Marshal. More info can be found here.

The Waco compound, meanwhile, was run by the Branch Davidians, a cultish, apocalyptic-minded splinter of the Seventh Day Adventists. They were led by one David Koresh (born Vernon Wayne Howell), a heretical Christian who proclaimed himself The Messiah and amassed large collections of both women (some of whom may have been... aw, who are we kidding, they were underage) and automatic weapons at his compound, the Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas. It was the guns that got the attention of the ATF, who, rather than trying to work with the local sheriff, tried to sneak onto the roof of the compound one night, which led to exactly what you think would happen to people sneaking around on someone else's property in the middle of the night in Texas. With four dead ATF agents on their hands, the FBI put the Branch Davidian compound under siege for 51 days starting February 28, 1993, before finally trying to storm the compound on April 19 with tear gas and a tank-mounted battering ram. This resulted in a fire that killed 74 of the compound's inhabitants. As before, more info can be found here.

Lastly, Oklahoma City perpetrator Timothy McVeigh did have connections to militia members and subscribed to extreme right-wing causes, but was never part of a militia himself, and worked with only a couple of other people. He was a Gulf War veteran who wanted to join the Green Berets, but was rejected when his psych profile declared him unsuitable, and he left the military not long after. He viewed the government as a bully, particularly in the wake of the aforementioned Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents, and timed his bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to coincide with the two-year anniversary of the end of the Waco siege.

The militia movement claimed these events, as well as such things as the Assault Weapons Ban and the Brady Bill, as supposed proof that the government was an Always Chaotic Evil force that wanted to destroy their way of life. Militia membership reached its peak in 1996, three years after Waco, though it would decline after that due to a confluence of reasons. The big one was perceived violence within the movement scaring away the more moderate members -- in addition to Oklahoma City, groups like the Montana Freemen and the Republic of Texas (a secessionist group claiming that the US had never legally annexed Texas) gave the movement plenty of bad press through their confrontations with law enforcement, as did "lone nuts" like Eric Rudolph (who bombed two abortion clinics, a gay bar and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics) and the Unabomber (mistakenly believed to be a right-wing militant until he published his anti-technology manifesto). The movement was hammered further by the failure of the much-feared Y2K bug to amount to much, the election of George W. Bush restoring conservatives to political power, and finally, the 9/11 attacks which split the movement into two factions -- one which believed that 9/11 was an inside job, and another that reaffirmed their patriotism and supported The War on Terror.