Man Shot Dead By Federal Agents In Oregon

I am sure that some of you have been following the protests at the (closed) wildlife refuge in Oregon, and are aware that federal agents shot a man dead.

It is late and I will be going to bed, so I won't go into a lot of detail, but I want to let you know that the media story of this event is not the only story, nor is it the one that seems the most credible.

The story that is being put out there by the government is that they had pulled the car over. Then the people tried to escape, and were forced off the road a little further down the road. One man tried to escape and, after initially putting his arms in the air, he reached for a pocket and was shot dead. They say that three shots were fired.

The other story is that they had brought the car to a stop, and requested to speak to a sheriff. Instead, federal agents began shooting at the car and that, before it was over, hundreds of shots were fired. With federal agents shooting at them, the driver attempted to save their lives by driving away, only to be forced off the road a little further along.

The man who was soon to be dead exited the car, and tried to run to the woods. When he was told to do so, he put his arms in the air, and kept them there as best he could while walking through deep snow. A federal agent shot him in the side. Instinctively, he reached for the area in which he had been shot, and was then shot dead. Photos of him taken previously, when he was carrying a firearm, show that he did not carry it on the side that he was reaching for.

The story that seems more credible to me is the one told by witnesses who were in the car. It is more credible for many reasons, but one of them is that it answers the following two questions:

1. After initially coming to a stop, why did the driver pull away again? Certainly, he couldn't have believed that he could outrun federal officers who were all over the place.
2. After the soon to be dead victim put his arms in the air, and seeing that there was no escape, why would he reach for his gun?

Here is a video of the shooting.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1000208526753703

Here is a recording of one of the women who was in the car at the time of the shooting.



Quite likely, neither the video or the audio recording will be available for long. Obviously, since I was not there, I don't know which story is correct, but if you have any interest in this at all, please watch the video and listen to the recording.

My expectations are that government agents will investigate and determine that the federal agents were justified in shooting the man, and that the only witnesses who are not government agents will be charged with one crime or another, and so their testimony will not be considered credible.

In Barack Obama's America, white lives don't matter so much, I'm afraid.

 

The FBI released the video. As for the car, the girl on the video, who was in it, said there were several gunshot wounds. When and if the government ever releases photos of the car, we'll have no way of knowing even whether it was the same car so I don't think that will answer the questions.

Yes, I know that there will always be those who will simply accept whatever the government says. This is an attitude that was fostered quite well in Germany several decades ago, and it looks like it had established a foothold here as well.

I am allowed to carry a loaded weapon here in Maine. However, if I shot someone because I thought he might have been reaching for his pocket, I don't think it would go well with me. Yet. while the police and federal agents receive extensive training, they are always held to a much lower standard that regular citizens are.

A kid with a toy gun? Shoot him. Someone answers his door at 3:00 in the morning carrying a rifle? Shoot him. Someone is found holding a rifle after the police have broken his door down in the dead of night, even if they accidentally entered the wrong house? You've got it, that was still found to be a justifiable shooting.

Our constitution allows us to carry a weapon, but the American people have still been conditioned to accept that any citizen with a weapon can be shot down on sight by anyone wearing a badge.

The law allows us to use a weapon in order to defend ourselves from home invasions, yet if the invaders are police officers who have entered the wrong house by mistake, it is still considered to be a justifiable shooting because the innocent homeowner had a weapon, and the sheep will say that the cops had to do it because he had a weapon.

These would be the same people who applauded when the federal government burned more than a hundred men, women and children to death near Waco several years ago because, after all, they had a weird religion and there were guns there. In their minds, the fact that the guns were legal and people are supposed to be allowed to adhere to strange religions in America didn't matter.

They have been conditioned to believe that the Constitution and the Bill or Rights are not relevant today, or that the government is allowed to infringe on these rights. The opposite is true. The Bill of Rights enumerates rights that are not supposed to be infringed by government, and specifically the federal government.

The authors of these documents weren't concerned that a baker might refuse to bake a cake or that members of a community might not embrace someone with a religion other than their own. No, they specifically hoped to ensure that the federal government wouldn't infringe on these rights.

While guns may be used for hunting or for defense against a mugger, the Second Amendment was intended to allow us to defend ourselves against a tyrannical federal government.

You may disagree with me if you like, but I am not German, and I am not a sheep. I understand that I am not going to be able to persuade everyone anymore than I might have been able to convince Germans in the 1940s that it was wrong to place Jewish people into ovens.

Government has all the power, including control over the media and the educational system, and they have access to methods of persuasion that you or I probably haven't even dreamed of, and it saddens and scares me to see how much people will accept.

 

Here is a constitutional take on the situation in Oregon, as well as those in Nevada and elsewhere. It doesn't speak to the shooting in Oregon specifically, but to the overall subject of land ownership. Her voice annoys me for some reason, but she makes valid points.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1070795146273987

One thing that people don't understand, unless they live in these areas or are involved in ranching operations, is that the government set the Bureau of Land Management over large areas of land in order to prevent large tracts of land from being bought up by expanding ranching operations. If we can assume that there once was an innocent purpose to it, the idea was not for the federal government to own this property, but to manage it for the purpose of allowing for shared use of the land for grazing purposes, as well as for recreational use by the public. In other words, the ranchers didn't need the land as part of their ranch, but simply needed it for grazing, but if the large ranch operations were able to buy it up, smaller operations would be unable to remain in business. So while this land is managed by the BLM, it is not owned by the BLM but is supposed to be available for the use of the public.

It drives me nuts when I hear people arguing that these ranchers are wrong to think that they have the right to graze their cattle on government land because that turns logic on its head. It was never supposed to be government land. It was supposed to be public land, managed - but not owned - by the Bureau of Land Management. If not for this, it all would have been privately owned, and in the hands of large ranching operations.

The BLM asked for a small fee, which was used to pay the expenses of managing the land, making sure that the public also had use of it, and that the larger ranch operations weren't driving small operations off of the land, etc.

While ranching operations were once considered to be a valuable industry, given that that people throughout the country have depended on the meat produced by the cattle grazing on these lands for food, in recent years, we have been burdened by a government that would rather have us buy our food from China and from other overseas sources, driving up both the quality and the price of food, helping in our government's mission to redistribute America's wealth to other nations. So the BLM began to raise the grazing fees to levels that many ranching operations couldn't afford, and to remove large tracts of land from the lands where grazing was permitted, under one pretense or another. In very recent years, the government began to assert its ownership of the land, obscuring the fact that it was merely supposed to be managing it for the use of the public and the ranching operations. They began cancelling grazing permits. They have started fires in order to render the land useless to those who still had grazing permits. They began jailing ranchers who resisted, burning their cattle and now, they have begun shooting them.

That is what the fuss is about. Please don't buy into the nonsense about how unreasonable these ranchers are to think that they should be able to graze their cattle on government land.

 

Here's some updated footage, enhanced video, etc.

 

I don't want to distract from the topic of this thread, and hope that I will be able to express it well enough so that you can see the relationship that I see between the two issues, those being the management of cattle lands in the Western states and the private ownership of timberland here in Maine. It may seem to be off-topic for a while but I hope to be able to bring it around so that it makes sense before I'm done.

If you look at a map, you will see that northwestern Maine, roughly one-third of the state, is uninhabited. This is all private land, mostly in the hands of large forest industries. Just as large parcels of Western lands were used primarily for grazing cattle, much of Maine has been used primarily for timber harvesting. Where the situations differ however, is that the federal government is managing the cattle lands while the forest lands are owned by large forest companies, which include paper companies, lumber companies, etc.

Throughout the centuries, that worked out just fine, in Maine as well as in the Western states. The lumber companies have always allowed public use of its lands for purposes such as hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, snowmobiling, and so on. In places like Millinocket, where there were paper mills, but also in places where there were sawmills and other types of forest industry operations, the companies gave parcels of land to their employees, generally along lakes and rivers, for the purpose of building camps and homes. In other places, they gave larger amounts of land to people who operated commercial hunting camps, summer camps, and the like.

Rather than deeding them the land, however, they leased it to them for a dollar a year, with 99-year renewable leases. Employees who built on this land owned whatever structures they put up, having a deed for the houses or camps, but not for the land beneath them. They paid property taxes to state and local governments for these properties and, because they were private roads, they had to pay to improve and maintain the roads leading to them, including arranging for plowing in the winter and so on.

These properties could be bought or sold, and even passed down to family members upon the deaths of the original leaseholders.

That went on just fine until recently. As recent as 2000, when we were looking for property in Maine, the real estate agents showed us several properties that were on leased lands. Not being familiar with the idea of leased lands, having never lived in Maine, I balked at that, but the agents assured me that it was essentially the same thing as owning the land, except that I would have to pay a dollar a year to whichever company owned the land, as well as a fee to whatever organization might have been set up for the purpose of maintaining the roads. I still didn't like the idea of leasing rather than owning the land, so I opted to buy a house on land that I actually owned.

Just a few years after we moved to Maine, however, things began to change. As paper companies and other lumber mills closed, their landholdings were put for bankruptcy protection or sold. The new owners saw properties along lakes, with buildings that ranged from rustic camps to elaborate homes, and they began to wonder whether they could do better than a dollar a year.

They began going to court and, in many cases, the leaseholders no longer had physical possession of the original lease papers. As long as the mills were still in business, the companies needed the employees, and the employees needed the land, and neither of these parties had any reason to suspect that the other would try to cheat them out of anything. These leaseholders lost their leases with little or no compensation whatsoever and, despite the fact that they had a title to the buildings that were sitting on this land, these buildings couldn't be moved because the wilderness roads were far too narrow to allow a building to be transported on them, and the new landowners refused to allow a widening of the road. The new landowners now had possession of both the land and the house, once the landowners quit paying their leases or the taxes on their buildings, and they were able to sell these properties for hundreds of thousands of dollars to wealthy people from Boston or New York, who now had summer homes in Maine.

The state government intervened as well as the court system, mostly on the behalf of the landowners. A few politically connected leaseholders were offered the deeds to the land beneath their homes in return for testifying in favor of the landowners in front of congressional panels. Some of the new landowners went to court and obtained permission from the court to make reasonable adjustments to both the stipulations to the lease for those who had their paperwork, as well as to the cost of the lease. Of course, these changes were anything but reasonable. One leaseholder was fined $10,000 for moving a rock in his back yard. A whole string of leases were made inaccessible when the new landowners removed a bridge over a stream, and the leaseholders were unable to obtain a permit to rebuild it. Leases went up every year to a point where they were paying the equivalent of a mortgage on a house as a lease payment for the land that the house sat on. Several couldn't afford it, and sold their homes to the landowners who were able to resell them at hefty profits.

A leaseholders association was formed to fight for the rights of leaseholders, and some counter suits were filed. A court ruled that the landowners had to offer the right to purchase to the leaseholders before selling the land to anyone else, but all this resulted in were notices giving the leaseholders thirty days to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars as payment for the land that was under houses that they already owned.

Believing that they had been cheated out of their homes, and realizing that they owned the buildings that made these properties valuable, some of the leaseholders burned or dismantled their properties before leaving. The state's land use committee stepped in to require a permit for the demolition of any building, and then refusing to grant such a permit, maintaining the value of the property for the landowners, who then sold the property, land included, to wealthy people from Boston or to the politically connected elite in Maine.

Then the big money environmental groups came in to make things even more difficult, forcing the closure of summer camps and hunting camps, and bringing further restrictions on what could be done on land near a river or a lake. Today, very few of those who had enjoyed homes and camps along the lakes and rivers of Maine still have them. Much of the land has been acquired by large environmental groups or by the wealthy woman who founded Burt's Bees, and hopes to be instrumental in forming a new national park here. These new owners had no trouble getting permits to demolish any buildings on the lands that they acquired, and many of these camps and homes have been removed. In most cases, the public does not have access to this land.

Here's the connection between the two issues, if you haven't figured it out by now. Had the federal government stepped in to manage the timberlands in Maine, the situation wouldn't have been any fairer. Comparing the leaseholders to the cattlemen from the Western states, the leaseholders would still have been cheated out of their land but it all would have been done at taxpayer expense. Any court cases filed by the leaseholders would have been against a federal government that had an unending supply of money on which to fight them, as well as control over the court system that would hear the cases, and leaseholders who still held out would be shot to death along lonely Maine roads, while the American sheep bought into the idea that this was justice. Everyone in Maine owns a gun after all, so surely we are all violent and deserve to die.

In the Western states, had the government not stepped in, the land would be in the hands of the largest cattle operations rather than the Bureau of Land Management. Smaller cattle operations would have limited grazing land, and no room for expansion of their operations, inevitably leading to a cessation of their business. The cattlemen may or may not have allowed public access to their lands but then, unlike Maine, there weren't very many people actually accessing the land in these areas anyhow. Once the government managed to ruin the cattle industry in Maine, as it has nearly every other industry we once had, the large cattle operations would be looking to do something else with it, such as making use of the uranium deposits and other valuable minerals that have only recently been found there, which may be the real reason why the government wants to move the cattle off of the land.

I will leave you with a refutation of one lie that we are hearing a lot of lately. Government land is not public land. We are the public and unless we have access to it, it is not our land.

 

Here is yet another issue of the government owning this land that we have seen occurring out in the western states last summer.
Wildfires.
Now, you can say that lightning can strike wherever it pleases, and start a wildfire, and that is certainly true; however, the land that the government owns with trees on it is simply left as it is.
I remember seeing pictures last summer of examples of owned woodlands , and next to that property was land that had been thinned properly.
The trees on the private property looked more like they were in a park, whereas the public forests had dry underbrush growing all through it.
It used to be that the Forest Service allowed people to get a permit and go on the public property and cut up winter firewood, which came from downed trees. This practice helped keep the forest cleaner, and the wildfires could not just blaze through the underbrush like they can on property where the land has been left untouched.
They have a saying out there that it to the effect of "graze it, log it, or watch it burn", and this is about the truth of things.

 

You're absolutely right. White lives don't matter so much.

 

Besides a policy of destroying all American industries, this might be the reason why the Obama Administration is hell bent on getting rid of Western ranchers.

 

I have read about the Clinton involvement in this whole mess, too, and there is actually a thread about that in the government and politics sub-forum (http://www.seniorsonly.club/threads/is-the-hammond-ranch-issue-all-about-uranium.2475/) that I posted in about this , as well as about the Bundy Ranch issue .

Both places are in the part of the United States where we still have deposits of precious metals, so this could be the heart of the issue from BOTH sides, and it is just not being spoken of at all.
The articles that explain about the valuable mining that was done in Nevada and then how the government simply shut down the whole city after the war was over and they didn't need the supply of metals as critically, help to show just why the Bundy family chose to stay on in the area, and also why the government wants them back out of there.
The situation in Oregon seems to be very similar.