The Vegas Shootings, the Bundy Ranch, and the Splits on the Radical Right

An interesting detail in the
Review-Journal‘s
report on the couple who killed two cops, a shopper, and
themselves in Las Vegas yesterday:

“The man told [a neighbor] he had been kicked off
Cliven Bundy’s ranch 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas while people
from throughout the U.S. gathered there in protest of a Bureau of
Land Management roundup of Bundy’s cattle.” Jessica Anderson, 27,
said. She lived next door [to the killers].

As always with the first claims that bubble up after a
high-profile shooting, you should take this with a grain of
salt. Obviously, there’s a bit of a telephone game going on
here: One neighbor heard something from another neighbor who said
he heard it from the shooter, who may or may not be reliable. For
what it’s worth, the paper reports that “the rancher’s wife, Carol
Bundy, said the shooting and the April standoff against the federal
government were not linked”; it quotes her saying “I have not seen
or heard anything from the militia and others who have came to our
ranch that would, in any way, make me think they had an intent to
kill or harm anyone.” That isn’t exactly a denial—it says
nothing about whether the Vegas couple showed up at the ranch and
was told by other activists to leave, which is what the man appears
to have been claiming. I expect we’ll see more detailed reporting
on this in the next few days.

But if this is true, it reinforces a point about the
dynamics of radical politics. As I’ve noted
before when writing about the militia movement, violence on the
far right often comes from hotheads who have been kicked out of the
more mainstream militias. (Is “mainstream” the right word? It’s all
relative, I suppose.) When actual organizations talk up
non-defensive violence, they are often isolated
and despised within the larger militia milieu. Yet these
divisions are frequently missed in public discussions of the issue,
which often lump all the “extremists” together—and, as a result,
look in the wrong places for terrorist threats. Even when analysts
argue that lone
wolves acting on their own are a more likely source of violence
than militias acting as groups, there’s a
mistaken tendency to treat “radicalization” as the problem and
to ignore all the cross-currents within a particular radical
community. (J.M. Berger offers some strong arguments against that
habit here.)

One last thought: I see The Washington Post is already
tentatively tying this to other “slayings…linked
to hate movements.” So it’s wise to remember the sociologist
Joel Best’s
comment that “crime waves” often turn out to be “waves in media
attention: they occur because the media, for whatever reason, fix
upon some sort of crime, and publicize it.” Shortly after Obama’s
election, a flood of stories suggested that right-wing violence was
on the rise; a few years later, a study from the Combatting
Terrorism Center at West Point
indicated that incidents of that sort actually declined in that
period. So don’t assume that a new age of domestic terror is
dawning. The Vegas killers seem to have believed they were the
vanguard of an uprising, shouting “This is the start of a
revolution!” before they opened fire. But I’m gonna go out on a
limb and say they were wrong.