In article <C5sEGz.Mwr@dscomsa.desy.de>, hallam@dscomsa.desy.de (Phill Hallam-Baker) writes:  |>  |> In order to reject the word of the FBI and BATF it is neccessary to beleive |> the words of a man who has just murdered 17 children and ordered the  |> suicide/murder of his other 80 followers. According to the account given |> the BATF attempted to serve a warrant upon Koresh at the ranch and were met |> by gunfire in a deliberate attempt to murder them. The Koresh/gun supporter |> claim that the BATF started shooting simply does not stand up. If the  |> AFT had gone there to start shooting they would have gone with heavier |> grade weaponry than standard issue handguns. For all practical purposes |> they were unarmed, the B-D followers had automatic weapons. |>  ... |> The people who do not want gun control must obviously discount the entire |> government story. This is simply rationalisation. It is not enough for  |> them to simply dismiss the government as incompetent. That would require |> them to come up with a solution themselves. Instead they have to come |> up with a government conspiracy theory whereby the government decided to |> set out to murder 80 people just to set up some sort of scare to alow them |> to get gun control legislation through. |>   I must object to the characterization of those opposed to the government's handling of the Waco situation as "gun supporters". Your argument tries to paint the BATF critics as right-wing gun nuts, and just mixes up two issues.  I am one of the BATF/FBI critics, and yet I am a liberal and just as anti-gun as you are.  I just happen to believe that everyone has civil rights, even religious crazies. They're all human beings, not some nest of wasps that you're trying to exterminate.  The BATF created the crisis situation by the way they handled the original raid.  It was well known that Koresh regularly went jogging outside his property.  He could have been served with a search warrant then.  He could have been arrested if he had refused to comply.  Instead officers armed with grenades invaded the property.  This escalated into a shooting war with tragic deaths on both sides.  Those were the first two mistakes:  the bad judgment of asking for a no-knock warrant, and the bad and probably illegal way the already-unwise warrant was served.  At this point, the situation escalated to where it was described as an armed standoff and a hostage crisis. That's when the government started covering their traces, sealing the warrant, revising their reported history of the incident, etc.  Things were already building up to disaster.  Now the government could have simply closed the supply routes and waited.  But according to Janet Reno, that option had "never been seriously considered".  So, supposedly because the agents were "frustrated and fatigued", and because there supposedly were no backups, they felt they had to go in.  Now it's entirely possible that Koresh was responsible for the fire.  If that's so, he deserves the blame for the deaths of the people in his compound.  But the government's hands are far from clean. Their first raid demonstrated bad judgment plus contempt for the 4th amendment.  The motivations for the second raid are just too unbelievable. And their coverup of the events of the first raid undermines their credibility in anything they do thereafter.  We have only some very biased FBI agents' word for what happened.  And please let's not turn this into a pro-gun vs. anti-gun discussion.  Anti-gun people do not believe that gun-owners deserve to get frontally assaulted by armed government agents.  And Koresh's civil rights exist whether his guns were legal, illegal, illegal-but-should-have-been-legal, or whatever!