Anniversary

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:23:24 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Mike Vanderboegh at Western Rifle Shooters - an essay on the fifteenth anniversary, 28 February, 2008, of the ATF attack on the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas.

Mike McNulty's documentaries on Waco, of which Rules of Engagement was the first, contain many images, most of them profoundly disturbing, disheartening and infuriating. But there is one bit of film shot by Dan Maloney and his cameraman that stands, I believe, as the Davidians' finest moment.

The ATF, you see, ran out of ammunition. Of all the stupidities of the raid, surely this represented the greatest danger to the attacking agents on the ground.

They were out.

The Davidians were not.

Had the Davidians wished to do so, they could have taken revenge for their dead 15 times over and the ATF would have been powerless to do anything about it. If ambush and murder had been their intentions as Cavanaugh and his fellow ATF "Good Ol' Boy Gang" members later claimed, the Davidians could have wiped them out at this moment, but they didn't.

What happened was that the ATF, out of ammunition, begged their erstwhile victims for a truce and the Davidians, satisfied that they had repelled the assault on their home let them go.

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