Spencer Schneier
        Staff Writer

Burying the lede. It’s something we, as journalists, are warned to avoid at all costs, but perhaps it is not something that the public is warned of when discussing the day’s political outrage on social media.

It is not often that an entire dialogue on a conversation buries the lede in such an obvious and disappointing way, but the discussion around the occupation of a federal wildlife refuge by Ammon and Ryan Bundy’s militia in Oregon is missing the point entirely.

The backstory, for those who don’t know: two men, Steven and Dwight Hammond were found guilty of arson on federal land. The Hammonds set these fires to prevent the growth of invasive plant species and reduce the risk of forest fire, which is a common practice and is accepted within the environmental science community as a responsible technique for managing risk of large-scale forest fires.

Steven Hammond was sentenced to one year in prison, his father three months, and both willingly served their sentences. However, due to a federal sentencing minimum, the two were forced to return to prison by a second judge, despite the argument by the original judge that invoking such minimums would be inappropriate and excessive.

Despite this argument from the judge, they were each sentenced to four additional years in prison to meet minimum sentencing requirements.

Hopefully, to this point, the story makes sense, and one can surely understand why there may be protest and controversy. It may still be difficult to understand the motivation behind an armed occupation of a building the federal government claims rights to.

But to understand why these people have chosen to seize this building, one must think about the role of all the actors involved in the standoff differently than they are preconditioned to.

There is often a notion that the government is the representation of the will of the people and that subverting it is some sort of fundamental disrespect to the people of the U.S.

What that notion misses is that the government is more of an excellent branding experiment for an organization that deals in violence and aggression.

When stripping the Hammonds and the government’s actions down to connotation-free descriptions, what we get are two people who felt their private property rights were being infringed upon by irresponsible behavior from their neighbors.

It is impossible to tell what they viewed their options for recourse as, but in the defense of their property, they did not have too many potential actions.

They could have sued the taxpayers of the U.S., despite them not being responsible for this irresponsible land management by the government; they could have set a controlled burn and run the risk, which is what they ultimately did; or they could have done nothing and run the risk of losing their land to invasive species or a potentially devastating forest fire.

It would have been unfair for them to punish the American people, and it is only from the privilege of an urban college environment, where we can try to marginalize the concern of the Hammonds that their land was at risk of some sort of environmental disaster.

When the federal government came down with extended four-year sentences for two men who were simply defending their property from a bad neighbor, that rightfully brought a lot of attention to the problems many have defending their private property rights.

This is where the Bundys come in, deciding that they are going to occupy a federal building to try and help change the fact that large swaths of the western United States are controlled by the federal government.

There are a few core arguments against the Bundys and their militia, so I think it will be best to try and address each of them.

The first, and by far the most absurd, is the notion that they are terrorists, and the media is simply shielding them because they are white. The idea that they are terrorists is simply false because they have not damaged any property or behaved aggressively at any point in the altercation.

While they are armed, they have practiced non-aggression, simply occupying the building they feel is theirs and saying they are willing to act in self-defense, should the government look to use force to try and reclaim it.

Another faulty argument is that the government has a right to the land, and the militia cannot violently seize this land because that is immoral to do. Well, how exactly did the federal government come into possession of large amounts of land out west?

I hate to break it to you, but it wasn’t by signing social contracts and negotiating fair compensation with the Mexican and Native American inhabitants of the land; it was by violent conquest and genocide.

If one wants to argue that the federal government has a right to the land, then that means the Bundys can have it too, just as long as they’re willing to murder thousands to obtain it.

It is important that they have not behaved violently towards anyone, and they have said they don’t intend to damage any property. They are not nonviolent, as they are willing to use violence in self-defense, but they are non-aggressive, in that they will not initiate the use of force on another human.

They are forcing the federal government to either return the land to local governments and private landholders, or to admit that a government’s legitimacy is based solely on its ability to initiate force.

It’s really quite brilliant what they have done; they have set up a near-perfect scenario to either allow the government to begin reforming itself beyond its aggressive policies or to show its true colors and use force to maintain its control over the land.

But hey guys, “Vanilla ISIS.” That’s pretty funny.

Burying the damn lede.