A fire’s burning in Oregon, but this runaway blaze was far from somebody failing to dump water on a campsite’s smoldering coals. There’s an armed standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and the owners of the Sugar Pine Mine over who owns the rights to the land it is on. However, instead of being content with the legal system or taking to news outlets to share their story, the owners of Sugar Pine have called in organizations such as The Three Percenters Club, Oath Keepers and the Arizona State Militia to have a standoff with law enforcement officials.
The disagreement comes down to who owns what rights to the land the mine is on; the BLM claims that the current owners have the mining rights to the land, but the surface rights were long since ceded to them. The owners claim otherwise and refuse to act on the notice they were handed because the BLM has yet to show proof of their ownership of the surface rights. This news would remain a nonissue if the owners complied and took normal channels to protest the decision. Instead, they have elected to call in a mob of goons with long guns, body armor and an unfounded resentment towards the federal government.
Just like the standoff in Bunkerville, Nev. last year involving a racist cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy, who failed to pay taxes, the introduction of these self-titled militias has definitely stopped any kind of eviction from being enforced, but it also has everyone walking on eggshells. It takes all of five minutes of reading comment sections of mainstream news articles to realize these people jump at anything the federal government does as some kind of gross overreach that hasn’t been seen since Nazi Germany. Reading some of their conspiracies would be hilarious if you ignore the fact that they’re angry, heavily armed and ready to overthrow the government.
While the organizer of the Oath Keepers has said that they’re keeping the protest limited in scope, one of the mine owners has flat out called the protest a circus. The conspiracy theorists and “endtimers” in support of the Sugar Pine Mine have also been harassing BLM employees and town officials over the phone through death threats. The event organizers might be able to keep the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters on the ground ‘in check,’ but their supporters in ideology and finances have other ideas. Whether it be wild accusations of President Obama being a Kenyan Muslim Socialist seeking to disarm the American populace or closet racism in their beliefs about African Americans and the criminal justice system, these folks are a special breed of degenerates with Internet connections.
I guess you can piss away the society that mankind has spent a couple millennia building since Hammurabi’s Code if you have a group of people with guns and itchy trigger fingers. What kind of dangerous precedent does this set for people who want to emulate these kinds of armed sit-ins? What kind of attitude is fostered when organizations assume they need to bring firearms to protests in order to be taken seriously? They claim to support the Constitution, but their interpretations of the Bill of Rights are deeply flawed and often supports their beliefs, while largely ignoring rulings of the Supreme Court that run counter to their worldview.
I find this scandal to be highly problematic and representative of the true relationship between the American political far right and the federal government. I’m a big supporter of the Second Amendment in addition to the rest of the Bill of Rights, but these glorified bullies in Oregon and their online backers make a political statement the responsible majority of gun owners and conservatives would blush at. We have no room for this kind of childish posturing when the whole world has its eye on us, and our government can’t do its job because a bunch of fearmongers wanted to play soldier.
Sergey is a freshman majoring in economics and international studies. What do you think of this situation? Send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com
