Hundreds of Armed Right-Wing Militia Members Take Over Federal Building

Rumor has it that they have finally shut off cell service/internet access to the refuge....

What is there to "own up" to? At that time, looking at that grainy-ass video taken from hundreds of feet away, you said he lowered his hands for "inexplicable" reasons (other than reaching for his gun, that is). The explanation now seems to be that lowered his hand to feel and cover the wound to his body.

At that time, it did seem he was disoriented and stumbling, and I assumed that it was because he was startled when he heard someone creeping up behind him. Having seen the enhanced video, the reason he lowered his hands now seems apparent, and there is no need to "guess" about why he did it.

You were suggesting that he had reached into his pocket for a gun and/or was reaching for a gun in his belt. It was always clear that he did not reach into his pocket for a gun. Nor did he have a gun in his belt, as you were suggesting at the time, so that wasn't a plausible explanation for his hands being lowered. Yet you gave that as the definitive and indisputable reason for his hand movements.

Wrong again. As I said at the time, NOBODY could be expected to get all the minute details straight after a brief look. And that included you. I didn't expect you to "know it all" after a couple viewings. You expected that of yourself, and were cocksure that you did know it all. But I didn't chide you for that.

Where you went wrong, blowhard, was in insisting that the girl was a liar who couldn't be believed about anything because, you said, she was "wrong." My only point was that if you were going to call her a liar, you would have to call ourself one. You were wrong.

Don't get me wrong. The "enhanced" video, though better than the original, is still of poor quality and from a great distance. It's hard to tell anything "for sure" from this one piece of evidence.

But it does add up. The FBI said he took 3 slugs. I only noticed 2 the first time. If the person posting the video hadn't stopped and started and replayed it several times, I probably wouldn't have suspected that the guy furtively sneaking back into the "crowd" after crouching there, prepared, fired the first shot. That wasn't what I was looking at, myself.

Immediately thereafter, Finny grabs his side and points at the guy. Again, it is unfortunate that there is no sound. Even though eyewitnesses never get every detail exactly right, I am quite willing to concede that those who were there, at ground level just a few feet away, with full sense capacity (sight, sound, etc.) would be in a much better position to know, interpret and understand what was happening that I could ever be from looking at that video. And that includes the cops. They obviously know a hell of a lot more about what actually happened than does anyone in this thread.

I read a story, not too long ago, about some black kid who was shot in the back while in police custody, handcuffed. This was down in Louisiana, I think.

The cops ridiclously claimed that the kid, while sitting in the back of the patrol car, hands cuffed behind his back, managed to take a gun out of his front pocket (which they had "somehow" failed to find when they searched him) before putting him there, and then shoot himself in the back.

Utterly ludicrous. But the coroner, without even testing the caliber of the bullet, declared that the shot was "self-inflicted" and cleared the cops on the spot. Quite typical, actually.

The point? As I said, the cops know a hell of a lot more about what happened to Finny than we do. But that doesn't mean I trust their tales about it. I want to see a full, impartial investigation of ALL the evidence. But I don't even begin to expect that either--at least not a complete and accurate summary of the evidence.

You scoffed at the idea that Finnicum took a bullet before he turned to face his vehicle, which was my original position. I took this position because his hands came down in front of him, and when you take your hands out of an I Surrender position when there is gun on you there is a big likelihood you will get shot immediately. I thought the cop running in from the road shot him, and that explained the rather ginger turn toward his vehicle before being shot at close range. You were quite sure that Finnicum was merely turning to face the cop coming up from behind, you precluded the possibility of injury at the time. You were arguing that Finnicum should have to withdraw his weapon before the cops had the right to shoot and I disagreed, lowering his arms out of the I Surrender position down to the body was enough.

After reviewing the film I wasn't so sure he had been shot before he turned. Now it looks like my original position is closer to the truth.

As for the theory advanced by Call For Duty Girl, I checked it out and then checked out the FBI video just for comparison. In both cases the actions of the cop who stayed in the road behind the car, next to the cop who ran into snow after Finnicum, were too blurry to absolutely say that the cop who stayed in the road shot Finnicum. However, he did seem to make some action facing Finnicum which roughly coincides with the time Finnicum lowered his arms the first time, after which that cop turned and went around the car. Finnicum then lifted his arms again momentarily, then brought them down in front of him again. All this could be coincidence, but maybe not.

Nothing definite, but the fact that the blurry motion of the cop who stayed in the road seemed to coincide with Finnicum first dropping his arms is enough to raise the question whether he really was shot with his hands up after all. I'm still not sure he was, but I'm no longer sure he wasn't either.

I did no such thing. Either paste the post where you claim I said that, or admit that you are "wrong," once again.

Thank you for giving a considered response, for once. I agree with just about everything you say here.

Yeah, best not to never listen to nuthin from nobody who don't toe the party line, eh? Especially when ya already know the cops were only doing justice when they smoked an inbred right-wing hillbilly.



Go figure, eh? How stupid can he get, I ask ya?

You asked for some posts where you scoffed at the idea that Finnicum. Here are most of the ones I was talking about.

A. http://able2know.org/topic/307729-68#post-6115953
There's a video of the murder here. The guy had his hands outstretched and was approaching the feds. Some fed snuck up behind him and shot him in the back. At the last second, before being gunned down, he heard the guy creeping up behind him and started to turn to see what it was. That's when he was executed.

B. Blickers wrote:


To which layman responded:

http://able2know.org/topic/307729-68#post-6116046


C. Quote Blickers:


layman wrote:
http://able2know.org/topic/307729-70
Once again, you sneer at the idea that Finnicum was killed by any method except the cop coming up to him from behind.

Oh, one more thing. This from one of your posts:

http://able2know.org/topic/307729-73#post-6116902

To which my answer is that you also have changed your opinion of the video, from he was shot by the cop who came up from behind-when his hands were not up-and over to he was shot with his hands up. If you can change as new information becomes available, so can anyone else.

LOL, that can be bad news for the holdouts. The Feds were using that internet channel to gather evidence against them, this might mean that the Feds now have so much evidence against them they can't take any more.

Speak for yourself. That's your subjective (and mistaken) conclusion I never said he was only shot from behind or anything like it. The issue was about why he might not have maintained a strict, "hands-up" posture. Being approached from all sides by bastards with loaded rifles pointed at your head would alarm anybody, especially if they (or some of them) appeared "suddenly." But this is especially true of someone who is already convinced that they are out to kill you. You're initial claim was that he couldn't possibly have been startled, because he never saw the guy coming.

As it turns out, although he was no doubt "startled" by seeing the guy sneaking up from behind, that's probably not the reason the was holding his side. At that point he surely knew that his death was imminent. It appears that he had already been shot at least once, probably twice, and the guy from behind indeed planned to finish him off.

Of course, as I've already said more than once. But I''m not the one who called anyone a "liar" simply because it wasn't clear that their percecption and recollection were completely perfect.

YOU'RE the one who made that announcement. I never heard you back off for one second from your pompous claim that Vickie Sharp was a straight-up liar. Would you give HER the chance to correct herself if she realized she had been mistaken about something? Hell, no, not from your tone. She is just a liar who completely fabricates, whole-cloth, every word that comes out of her mouth. She is NOT entitled to the benefit of any doubt, to hear you tell it.

I can't tell from that video which of the two stalking him fired first. You can't hear sounds. Until he actually falls, I can't even tell for sure that he's even been hit. I don't see blood, bullet holes, sharp reactions to wounds, or anything else. You can see a "flash" from the rifle behind him, because you're looking in that direction. But I can't tell just when the stalking guy in the front fired.

By the way, if he had in fact been shot while trying to surrender with his hands up, then he had every right to go for his gun. That would not be grounds for shooting him again.

Needless to say, he was hopelessly outnumbered and already wounded to begin with, so any attempt to fire back would be suicide, even if he did have the "right" to do it.

Should have been done weeks ago.

Hawkeye, you just can't help being you, can you? It makes your fake ebonics even all the more offensive.

This looks like a pretty good analysis of the shooting by people who are very pro gun and sympathetic to the militia's message: http://bearingarms.com/lavoy-finicum-murdered-forced-oregon-police-shoot/

I must have watched the video 20 times and I can't tell, with any certainty, what happened. It looks like the guy was fumbling to get something at his waist level, before he was shot.

There is no way I (or I think anyone else) can tell if he even partially drew the gun it's reported he had in his pocket.

My question is, is it SOP for an FBI agent to fire on a suspect believed to be armed and dangerous, if he make a move like we see on the video?

If it is, I don't really have a problem with the agent's action. If it isn't, then I do, not because it's not a rational response to a threat, but because the rules are the rules. If it's not OK to fire on a young black man who has fled the scene of a crime, if he lowers his hands and fumbles them around his waist, then's not OK to fire on a jacked-up, self-appointed "patriot" who does the same.

When you're part of a group that has told the world that you are armed and prepared to die, and know the law enforcement is looking for you; when they find you and order you to not move, keep your hands in the air, or get on your knees and you don't, you are very, very stupid no matter what your race, gender, religion or politics.

If it's SOP for an FBI agent to fire on someone who doesn't follow his orders and then even appears to be reaching for a weapon, then you have stupidly invited the agent to shoot you.

Reading some of the comments in this thread, it seems to me that some are allowing their ideological bias to influence their judgment on the validity of this shooting. Folks who will present reams of minutiae (often irrelevant and suspect) to support their belief that a cop shooting was the act of a racist executioner are, in this case, all gung-ho about the FBI taking down a violent seditionist. Obviously inconsistent positions lead to charges of hypocrisy. If the shoe fits...

Returning to prior comments made about people mocking these guys, it appears that this fellow was one of the violent men of which I wrote. He may be stupid, he may be crazy, but if the FBI agent was justified in shooting him, he was, obviously, prepared to engage in violence even though he know he would die. This willingness is only heroic if you share his values, his thinking and his cause. I can sympathize with certain aspects of all of these, but not at all with the actions that have been taken by these men. He's in no way a hero to me.

However, I don't have to find him heroic to recognize his willingness to do violence. I could think he was entirely evil and it wouldn't change the fact that he was a rough and violent man; more likely it would compliment that fact.

Mockery is a great weapon when it is used intelligently, which is to say when the mockery aligns with the nature or deeds of the target. Mocking Hillary Clinton's claims to feminism when she participated in smearing the victims of Bill's harassment would be a good example. Mocking the narcissist Donald Trump's ludicrous hair is a bit juvenile, but there's a connection, and this brings up the fact that mockery often borders on the juvenile. It crosses the border when the mockery is unrelated to the nature and deeds of the target. As well, mocking violent men as being impotent or unmanly,from the obvious safety of a computer screen, is not only juvenile, it's cowardly. Claiming that you would have no problem mocking these thuggish men to their faces is either preposterous or a sign of diminished capacity.

I haven't kept very up to date on all that's happened since the shooting, but I'm sure there will, at least, be some sort of departmental inquiry, and the dead man's family could try and sue the FBI. If it turns out everything was done according to Hoyle I won't be surprised, but then I also won't be terribly surprised if it turns out the agent shot without sufficient justification. I'd hate to be in the shoes of an FBI agent or a cop. I doubt I would be wearing those shoes for long since I think I probably would have shot the guy, the second he brought his hands down.

Clearly the FBI was concerned enough about any allegation it illegally gunned him down, that it took the unusual step of releasing this video. It would have been a lot more effective in quashing arguments if it was taken from a much closer vantage point, but it's good enough for me to draw a reasonable conclusion, providing the FBI followed procedure.

It was an Oregon state trooper who shot him, not the FBI.

I believe it is SOP for them to shoot someone KNOWN to be armed and dangerous when they make moves like this.

The link I posted just above your comment gives a pretty fair and balanced analysis of the whole thing. I think it's worth reading.