Tyranny, 'Mandatory Buybacks', and Why Militias Matter - A Rant
On July 1, the militia movement was back in the news as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrested a dozen members of a group it called the "Viper Militia." President Clinton offered his congratulations the next day, "saluting the enforcement officers who made the arrests in Arizona yesterday to avert a terrible terrorist attack. Their dedication and hard work over the last six months may have saved many lives." Attorney General Janet Reno was also effusive, declaring that the BATF agents had bravely defended the nation from "a potentially dangerous situation." Raymond Kelly, the Treasury Department undersecretary who oversees the BATF, hailed the demise of an "armed and dangerous" militia group bent on stirring up "civil unrest."
Government spokesmen described a plot, supposedly recorded on videotape, to blow up several federal buildings, the Phoenix Police Department, the Arizona National Guard headquarters, and a local TV station. BATF officials spoke of seizing 77 machine guns, hundreds of other firearms, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, booby traps, tons of ammonium nitrate (the fertilizer used in the Oklahoma City bombing), and explosives such as nitromethane (also used in Oklahoma City) and lead azide, described by experts as a powerful and unstable primary explosive.
All in all, it sounded as if the BATF had done what it is supposed to do: prevent domestic terrorists from wreaking havoc. The local and national media helped trumpet the achievement, flashing colorful graphics of targeted buildings on television screens and trekking with cameras to remote desert areas where the Vipers had blown things to smithereens. "'Vipers' in the 'Burbs," read the headline on the lead story of Newsweek's July 15 issue. "They all looked ordinary, but harbored an obsession with guns–and possibly terror," said the subhead. "The Feds may have busted them just in time." The story continued, "How this particular mix of people came so close to the edge of terrorist violence is a mystery for now," but "given the Vipers' wild talk and vast arsenal, the Feds had no real choice but to move sooner rather than later."
Since then, some details have come to light that suggest the Vipers were not quite as dangerous as the BATF would have us believe. Further grounds for skepticism are likely to emerge at their trial, scheduled to begin December 3. It will be interesting to see whether the national media follow these developments with the same breathless attention they devoted to the case as the government spun it on that first day.
As it turned out, there was no terrorist plot. Furthermore, the "vast arsenal" kept shrinking. Seventy-seven machine guns dwindled to four, and the unstable lead azide was transformed into lead styphnate, then lead picrate, a less dangerous compound. The amount of ammonium nitrate was reduced to 500 pounds, plus 14 or 15 gallons of nitromethane, all of which is legal to possess. But we'll have to take the BATF's word for all of this, because agents rushed the seized explosives (alleged explosives?) to the desert and blew them up. Most of the guns turned out to be legal World War I and World War II surplus rifles–not surprising, since a couple of the men arrested were collectors and one had a federal firearms license.
Oh, and by the way, there was no militia. The name "Viper Militia" first surfaced in a BATF affidavit and was dutifully transmitted in press reports. But the group called itself Team Viper or the Viper Team, not the Viper Militia. The government has not alleged that the Viper Team was affiliated with any militia group (though some of its members were rumored to have been kicked out of a group called the Militia of Arizona, and Viper was briefly affiliated with an ad hoc Arizona militia umbrella group called Alliance in Militias, but pulled themselves out). Nor are the Vipers mentioned in two recent books on the dangers of the militia movement by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee. (See "The Militias Are Coming," August/September.) This particular militia threat seems to have been conjured up mainly by the BATF.
Government spokesmen said the Vipers came to the BATF's attention after hunters and Boy Scouts encountered armed people in camouflage who were setting off explosions in the Tonto National Forest, about 60 miles northeast of Phoenix. One of the hunters reported the incident to a state Game and Fish officer in November 1995. He said the armed men, who warned the visitors to leave the area, claimed to be working security for a mining operation that was blasting nearby.