Thirty Years From Waco: What the Fatal Siege Wrought
20th April 2023
On a windy morning thirty years ago, the FBI staged a surprise attack on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.
The Branch Davidians were a splinter group of Seventh-day Adventists who followed the apocalyptic preaching of their self-styled prophet, David Koresh. They had been holed up in their ramshackle retreat for fifty-one days. Finally, at 6:02 a.m. on April 19, 1993, tanks broke through the compound’s flimsy walls, firing tear gas at the people inside. The gas was meant to end the standoff by flushing the Davidians out, but Koresh had handed out Army-surplus gas masks. Some of the Davidians took shelter. Others shot at the tanks and federal agents outside.
Hours later, fire leveled the compound. Several Davidians burned to death. Many were buried alive when the tanks knocked walls onto them. Koresh and all but nine of his followers died.
And that is where the full story of Waco begins.
April 21st, 2023 at 23:55
We’ll never know how much money was spent on Waco, because much was hidden in the DOD budget. If you include the inquiries after the fact, the cost has been estimated at between $100 million to twice that. Imagine if the government went into a major city and went after street gangs with that kind of budget. How about if they just fixed the street lights and put a few patrol cars out. Significant reductions in crime would be noticeable.
What a bunch of folks did on a farm outside Waco didn’t keep me up at night worrying. In fact, it wasn’t worth thinking about it at all. What got those folks killed was that they openly claimed they didn’t care what the government wanted them to do. Frustrated Texas cops tried to make the ATF understand that Koresh went to town once a week for pizza and they could easily arrest him there. No, it was time to teach everybody a lesson on what the boss can do to you if you make him unhappy.
Waco was nothing more than wholesale murder by an arrogant and overreaching government. Afterwards they did the same thing that they did with MOVE in Philadelphia and what they tried to do with Randy Weaver; they all got together in a closed meeting and discussed the event until they all agreed that it was the dead people who caused the problem. Case closed.
I saw a post on a gun forum not long ago where someone happened to meet one of the former FBI agents involved with Weaver. The poster was shocked to hear the guy brag about his role and proclaim that the famous sniper shot (in which Weaver’s wife was killed when she opened the door with her baby in her arms) was a “justifiable shot”. If you read Chris Kyle’s book, you would see that such a shot in Afghanistan or Iraq would put the sniper in prison.
April 22nd, 2023 at 10:11
The fact that Lon Horiuchi is still wandering around free is a standing disgrace.