Nov 26, 2008

Back to Ruby Ridge; It's Personal

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The excuses are starting to flood the internet from panicked flacks at H.S. Precision, a maker of sniper rifles and gear. HSP figured it  scored a coup in getting an endorsement from one Lon Horiuchi, crack FBI sniper and leader of snipers.  His letter is spread across the back of the new HSP catalog. Bad guess. Bad endorser. 

Balls in a vice, the best the company can do so far is disclaim prior knowledge of  who Lon Horiuchi is, other than a government killer,  honorably retired.   No Google there at HSP? Or just too busy to enter the 12  keystrokes yielding  17,300 Horiuchi hits? Or too swamped to ask virtually any of your customers? 

Lon Horiuchi  was the government marksman present and firing  at Ruby Ridge on August 22, 1992.  He  was after Randy Weaver,  wanted on a couple of low-level felony charges. He wounded Weaver,  shot at the back of a fleeing Weaver friend,  missed the friend but cleanly killed Vicki, one shot to the head as she stood behind a door, her baby in her arms. 

This is not the sort of man designed to win friends in the shooting community -- or the community of citizens who object to trigger-happy government snipers just as a matter of general principle.


Enter my memory of  Janine, RIP, my little sister, in her girlish years a Brownie, a horse buff, a barrel racer, and a friend of Vicki Jordison in the Des Moines River valley where our families were neighbors. In due course Vicki, a very nice kid as I recall, married Randy Weaver.  

Before Horiuchi killed Vicki, Janine died of a different  kind of evil, that of stupidity, a driver who explained, "I didn't notice the yellow line on the highway... errr, no, I didn't see the sign, either."

Was -- is --  Horiuchi stupid? Probably not. He got into West Point and graduated. He's clever enough to turn a retirement buck hustling endorsements.  So probably not stupid.  

What does that make him?  

Horiuchi,   you didn't have to hear again what much of your country still thinks of you. You could have taken the pension, foregone the endorsement  fee, and retired to Tierra del Fuego,  mouth shut all the way.

(A fair representation of  current thought on Horiuchi and HSP is available by just clicking Tam's blog,  View From the Porch, over to your left.)

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