Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Friday stood by his statement regarding embattled Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, saying on KSNV’s What’s Your Point?, “If anyone thinks by any figment of their imagination that what happened up there last week was just people rallying to somebody that was oppressed, 600 people came in armed. They had practiced. They had maneuvered.”
Reid continued, “They knew what they were doing. They set up snipers in strategic locations with sniper rifles. They had assault weapons. They had automatic weapons. And they boasted about the fact that they put women and children, in fact one retired sheriff from Arizona posted he put women and children, so that they would get hit first.”
Reid then concluded, “If there ever was an example of people who were domestic violent terrorist wannabes, these are the guys, and I think that we should call it that way. We have a situation that is really untoward.”
Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) objected to Reid’s description of the events in Bunkersville, Nevada, last week at Bundy’s ranch. Heller told What’s Your Point? Hosts Jeff Gillan and Amy Tarkanian, “What Senator Reid may call domestic terrorists, I call patriots. We have a very different view on this.”
Reid responded, “These people think they’re patriots, and they’re not. If they’re patriots, we’re in big trouble.”
“It’s a pretty broad brush when you have boy scouts there. You have veterans at the event. You have grandparents at the event. And these are people who, as long as they’re not promoting violence, in my opinion…” said Heller.
Reid, shocked by Heller’s remarks, said, “Promoting violence? There were sniper rifles. Talk to Sheriff Gillespie – automatic weapons. That’s grandmothers? That’s boy scouts? I hope not, because we got more problems with boy scouts than whether they can have gay leaders, if that’s the case.”
Heller told Gillan and Tarkanian that he took “more issue with BLM coming in with a military army of individuals with snipers. I was talking to individuals at the event, and to have your own government with sniper lenses on you – it made a lot of people very uncomfortable.”
Heller says he plans to call for hearings on Capitol Hill to try and find out why BLM handled the situation so heavy-handedly as well as the situation surrounding the federal ownership of land, while Reid has spoken to Clark County Sheriff Gillespie, Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, and FBI chief James Comey as to what steps to take next.
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