On This Day in History: August 22

Ruby Ridge

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You know those fragile-as-fuck rectal abscesses who need to open carry an assault rifle just to get a goddamn latte? The wannabe warriors in their “tacticool” gear and empty head-to-toe camo strolling the aisles of the Walmart battlefield? America’s modern militia movement was born at Ruby Ridge.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 22, 1992--

White supremacist Randy Weaver failed to appear in court on firearms charges, and on August 21, 1992, six U.S. Marshals went to the Weaver compound to arrest him; it did not go well. During recon the marshals encountered Randy’s friend Kevin Harris, Weaver’s 14-year-old son Sammy, and their dog. There was a shootout. The dog died. So did Sammy and one of the marshals, Francis Degan.

A siege began, but the killing was not over. Sniper teams were deployed. The “rules of engagement” were later described as “severe” and “inappropriate.”

One sniper was Lon Horiuchi, a former U.S. Army officer and member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. The following day, August 22, Randy Weaver went to the shed to visit the body of his dead son when Horiuchi shot him in the back, wounding him. Weaver, his 16-year-old daughter, and Kevin Harris ran back toward the house. Horiuchi fired a second round at Harris as he entered the Weaver home. The bullet passed through Harris’s chest, wounding him, and entered the body of Randy Weaver’s wife, Vicki, who had been standing inside holding their ten-month-old daughter. Vicki Weaver died.

The siege would last another nine days.

A Department of Justice Task Force determined that the first shot met the criteria for “objective reasonableness” for use of deadly force but the second did not because Horiuchi couldn’t know if anyone was inside the door of the home.

In the aftermath, Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris were acquitted of all charges relating to the siege, and in a civil suit the Weaver family was awarded $3.1 million and Harris got $380,000. There was no admission of wrongdoing by the government.

Horiuchi was charged with manslaughter for the death of Vicki in 1997, but the charges were later dismissed. He was also present as a sniper at the Waco Texas raid in 1993. Ruby Ridge and Waco provided the motivation for domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, another white supremacist, to murder 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. These events became ripe recruiting material for right-wing American militias. Tracking murders committed by domestic extremists revealed that between 2007 and 2016, 74% of all such killings were committed by right-wingers. Since then, they were further emboldened with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, and happily volunteered as his personal army in his failed coup attempt against the U.S. government on January 6, 2021.

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