"Something is wrong"

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views July 9, 2001]

It's easy to laugh at those paranoid losers holed up in their cabins deep in the woods, fretting about Federal agents in black helicopters. But, in the Nineties, a surprising number of them discovered the black choppers really did exist. They showed up at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, when Randy Weaver missed a court date after being entrapped by undercover Feds into selling them a sawn-off shotgun. He looked out his window to see a government robot with a gun in its claw moving across his porch. The flesh-and-blood agents shot and killed his son and his wife, the latter in the back while she was cradling her baby.

There wasn't much about Weaver on the news: East Coast media types aren't terribly interested in survivalist cranks. But Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran and Bronze Star holder, was incensed. Then came Waco: If the Feds had taken out a gay nightclub in the East Village, you'd never have heard the end of it; but instead they immolated a loonytoon religious cult way out in the "heartland" and no one cared. McVeigh did: He briefly considered assassinating Janet Reno, but then decided on something more ambitious. "Tim McVeigh was trying to make a point," says Randy Weaver. "He was going to be judge, jury and executioner. No different from the federal government. One has a badge and one don't."

Let it be said that what Timothy McVeigh did is evil. But something is wrong when the state's paramilitary police can kill its own citizens with impunity, those responsible get promoted, and the big news organizations can't even recognize public anger over it. Two wrongs don't make a right. But killing McVeigh for the second wrong shouldn't blind us to the first.

-- Mark Steyn, "McVeigh and other angry, invisible men," National Post, May 10, 2001.

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