Oregon’s militia standoff: News and updates

The militant Bundy family is making national headlines once again, following a shootout with federal officials near Burns, Oregon.

After weeks of the tense Oregon militia standoff led by the Bundys, law enforcement officials reportedly stopped a vehicle driven by militia members on Tuesday night, leading to a shootout that left one militia member dead and five others arrested.

Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, the Oregon militant killed by law enforcement Tuesday night, swore repeatedly that federal authorities wouldn’t take him alive.

Finicum, a 55-year-old rancher from northern Arizona, said it over and over to the media outlets that interviewed him while he sat under a blue tarp at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

Eleven members of the militia group that has occupied Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon, have been arrested, including leader Ammon Bundy.

There are still an unknown number of militia members occupying the main building of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Oregon Public Broadcasting’s John Sepulvado tweeted that they have decided to stay, and that the FBI has surrounded roads to the refuge.

A militia protesting the “tyranny” of the federal government seized the headquarters of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon on January 2 and, in a video posted to Facebook, called on “patriots” from all over the country to come to the refuge with their guns to join their fight.

On January 26, six members of that militia, including leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy, were arrested on charges of conspiracy to impede federal law enforcement officers from their official duties. The arrests happened after a shootout in which one militia member was killed, and another injured.

To many people, the most notable thing about the ongoing takeover of a federal government building in Burns, Oregon, is what it doesn’t resemble: law enforcement’s response to groups of nonwhite protesters, which is often much more aggressive even when the protesters are not armed, occupying government property, or issuing vague threats about being willing to respond with violence.

But it’s hardly unthinkable that law enforcement officials would respond aggressively to armed white right-wing extremists. In the early 1990s, in two high-profile standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, that’s exactly what they did. And it turned out disastrously for them.

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has a message for the armed militia members occupying a federal building in Oregon: Stand down.

“Every one of us has a constitutional right to protest, to speak our minds,” Cruz said, according to NBC News. “But we don’t have a constitutional right to use force and violence and to threaten force and violence against others. So it is our hope that the protesters there will stand down peaceably, that there will not be a violent confrontation.”

What led a militia to take over a federal building in Oregon? Behind the tense standoff is a legitimate protest over a troubling law — specifically, a very harsh mandatory minimum sentence.

The building takeover began after armed men broke off from a peaceful march over prison sentences given to two local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond. The dad and son have been sentenced to five years in prison for starting fires in 2001 and 2006 — supposedly to kill invasive species and protect their ranch — that damaged public land. No one was hurt as a result of the fires, but federal law required a judge to give the ranchers at least a five-year sentence anyway.