Militias

Armed citizens militias emerged in all fifty states in the mid-1990s, with between 20,000 and 60,000 active participants at the height of militia activity. According to a tally kept by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), there were 224 militia units in 1995. The number of units reached a peak at 858 in 1996. Thereafter, yearly totals dropped, and by 2000, there were only 194 units (SPLC 2001: 8). The militias came out of a broader preexisting right-wing “Patriot” social movement that involves as many as 5 million Americans. Patriots believe the government is manipulated by sub-versive secret elites and is planning to use law enforcement or military force to repress political rights.

Patriots created the militias because of their anger over government errors and abuse of power that resulted in needless deaths at the Weaver family cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. In these confrontations, federal law enforcement agents failed to consider the role of antigovernment apocalyptic beliefs in the volatile reactions of the Weaver family and the Branch Davidians.

Randy Weaver and his wife were Christian Identity [Page 1061]adherents who adopted a survivalist mindset and moved to a remote location in the mountains. The discovery by the Weavers of a secret government surveillance team quickly escalated into a deadly shoot-out in which a federal marshal and Weaver's wife and son died. The Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was a Christian fundamentalist church and survivalist retreat. The U.S. government failed to comprehend that the Davidian wordview espoused by David Koresh, leader of the group, was part of rising millennialist expectations generated by the approach of the year 2000. A series of miscalculations by by government agents cost the lives of eighty Branch Davidians and four government agents.

Initially organized to block federal laws regulating the use of firearms, the armed citizens militias are one of a series of populist movements that have arisen periodically throughout U.S. history to mobilize “the People” against what are portrayed as government elites who have become corrupt or indifferent. Catherine McNicol Stock argues that the two key themes in these movements are “the politics of rural producer radicalism and the culture of vigilante violence” (1996: ix). Such populist movements can align with the left or the right, and Stock notes that “the roots of violence, racism, and hatred can be and have been nourished in the same soil and from the same experiences that generated rural movements for democracy and equality” (148). While there are a few urban and suburban militias, the movement is strongest in rural areas.